CELS Webinar: 'EU Integration under attack: how can new interdisciplinary perspectives on EU law enhance the debate?'

Title: 'EU Integration under attack: how can new interdisciplinary perspectives on EU law enhance the debate?'

Speaker: Dr Brigitte Leucht, Portsmouth University 

Biography: 

Brigitte Leucht is a senior lecturer in European Studies and the Chair of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Ethics Committee at the University of Portsmouth. Her fields of research and expertise include the history of European integration and transatlantic relations in a global context. Brigitte’s publications draw on multi-lateral archival research and they are guided by innovative interdisciplinary approaches focused on collaborating with researchers in the social sciences and law. She is the co-author and co-editor of Cassis de Dijon: Forty Years On, Oxford, Hart, 2021 (with Albertina Albors-Llorens and Catherine Barnard) and The History of the European Union: Origins of a Supranational Polity 1950-72, Abingdon, Routledge, 2009 (with Wolfram Kaiser and Morten Rasmussen).

Abstract: 

Historians and social scientists have for some time engaged with the CJEU and its jurisprudence. Only the recent rise in nationalism and populism, as exemplified by the Brexit vote of 2016, however, has led analysts and proponents of the EU to engage more comprehensively with some of the concerns of European citizens. In the context of a wider questioning of the popular legitimacy of the EU, lawyers, social scientists, and historians have begun interrogating progressive accounts of European integration and have shifted their attention to the (mixed) experiences of European legal and market integration by ‘ordinary’ Europeans. But what might be the specific benefits of a temporal approach to examine the impact of EU law and policy on Europeans and on European societies? This talk addresses this question by first highlighting recent critical contributions by historians and sociologists to the study of EU law. Second, the presentation will draw on my ongoing research project on how consumers have experienced the creation of the EC common market from the 1970s to argue that there is far more significance than just intellectual curiosity for lawyers to engage with the past.

Zoom Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_MQqP-mYPSXSQKkEeUYNg9w