European Union law: a unified academic discipline?

In this paper, presented to an interdisciplinary workshop on ‘The European Legal Field’, the author examines the way in which one sub-field, namely that of academic writing on European law, is structured. Some factors point to the existence of a relatively unified, cross-national community of scholars, but other, and perhaps more weighty, factors denote a rather more fragmented reality. This fragmentation is caused by legal education and training, which takes place overwhelmingly in a national context and is deeply embedded in national legal cultures. The fragmentation is also expressed in the ways in which legal scholarship is produced and distributed. These are marked by separation along linguistic and national lines, and along the established lines of legal sub-disciplines that, in many countries of Europe, tend to ‘absorb’ European law scholarship into existing academic frameworks.