Interdisciplinary Research Methods in EU Law - A Handbook

This comprehensive Handbook provides a critical and analytical guide to the application of interdisciplinary research methods in EU law and explores the advancement of the EU legal landscape from an interdisciplinary research perspective. Venturing beyond doctrinal legal scholarship, it reflects on the cognitive synergies between EU law and other disciplines, and advances the debate on contemporary trends in EU law research.

Bringing together a carefully selected group of expert authors, this Handbook surveys the ways in which studying and researching EU law has become an increasingly integrative endeavour. It presents key insights from fields traditionally associated with EU law, including history, economics and political science, but also disciplines traditionally less explored by EU lawyers, such as literature, social psychology and data science, thereby offering novel perspectives and epistemological tools that enrich our understanding of the EU and its laws. Showcasing the variety of research questions and methods advancing EU law studies, it provides a systematisation of the diverse approaches to studying the legal order of the EU.

Interdisciplinary Research Methods in EU Law is essential reading for researchers, academics and graduate students of European law and politics, and for those interested in research methods in law. Think tanks, research institutes and practitioners of EU law and related areas will equally benefit from the applied nature of the text.

Introduction to Interdisciplinary Research Methods in EU Law 1
Rossana Deplano, Giulia Gentile, Luigi Lonardo and Tobias Nowak
1 Reflections on methods and interdisciplinarity 6
Luigi Lonardo and Tobias Nowak

PART I UNVEILING THE CONTEXT OF EU LAW THROUGH
INTERDISCIPLINARITY
2 EU gender politics and law: the case of sexual minorities 20
Alina Tryfonidou
3 The role of disability studies in the advancement of EU law scholarship 39
Delia Ferri
4 The promise of judicial biography for the study of the European Court
of Justice 59
William Phelan
5 Behavioural law and economics in European competition law: from
a more economic to a more realistic approach? 75
Klaus Mathis and Martin Meier
6 Legal opportunity structures: social movements in the European courts 97
Francesca Colli
7 EU law: the view from European schools of security 116
Rita Floyd

PART II RE-CONCEPTUALIZING EU LAW THROUGH
INTERDISCIPLINARITY
8 Complementing IQ with EQ: connecting EU law to social psychology 133
Armin Cuyvers, Eva Grosfeld and Daan Scheepers
9 EU law and subsidiarity: lessons from economic analysis of law 154
Roger Van den Bergh
10 The EU rule of law crisis from an empirical perspective: exploring the
contours of a social science that does not yet exist 174
Marc Hertogh and Erin Jackson
11 Democratic backsliding in the European Union: reassessing legal
definitions of democracy 196
Kanita Abazi, Niklas Buscher and Torsten J. Selck
12 International relations scholarship on the European Union and EU law:
ships passing in the night? 212
Annette Freyberg-Inan
13 The application of EU law from the national judge’s perspective: a plea
for an interdisciplinary approach 225
Giulia Gentile, Monika Glavina and Tobias Nowak
14 EU law and law and humanities: a novel method inspired by Paul
Ricoeur and James Boyd White 247
Jeanne Gaakeer and Pauline Phoa
15 Constructivist approaches and institutional constructivism in EU legal
scholarship 265
Dora Kostakopoulou
16 Marxism in EU legal scholarship 279
Luigi Lonardo
17 Riddling in threes, empty fourths, and the invisible empire: Kant and EU law 302
Aravind Ganesh
18 The European Union as a Christian democracy: a heuristic approach 326
Carlo Invernizzi Accetti
19 An analytical framework for EU law externalisation: the EU Data
Protection General Regulation as a case study 342
Stefania Kolarz