Legal Scholarship and External Critique in EU Law

The propensity to engage in a sustained critique of EU law marbles several contributions in this Volume and certainly animates this chapter. This generally critical stance takes the present stage of legal Europeanization as a fact and aims to make full use of the possibilities for political and social justice it can currently support, but at the same time it decries its many structural and dynamic drawbacks. In doing so, this critical project borrows liberally from CLS without fear of misreading or misappropriation. Irreverence in this context is a feature, not a bug. The CLS toolkit is clearly useful to European scholars, but there is no pretense here of fidelity to the original CLS conception. Transformations can be productive on EU soil, and there is no reason not to utilize, albeit in a different epistemic environment, the motivational force of lessons drawn from far-away places or times.