Knowing EU law : how epistemic and ontological commitments shape different understandings of European law and why it matters

Abstract

This paper discusses how epistemic and ontological commitments shape different understandings of European law and why it matters. As the paper demonstrates, many key debates on EU law – and some of the fiercest disagreements in European legal scholarship – go back to divergent epistemic and ontological commitments. While these philosophical commitments usually operate in the background, this paper foregrounds them. The hope is that this will contribute to bringing more clarity about the nature of the disagreements in some of the main battlefields in European legal scholarship, as well as on the prospect of reaching agreement. Beyond theoretical clarity, however, the main reason for the present inquiry is more practical and political. A core aim of the paper is to denaturalise the epistemic and ontological groundings of mainstream approaches to EU law and, thus, to demarginalize approaches more peripheral to the centres of power in EU law making and in EU legal academia. There exists no obvious relationship, to say the least, between the political and academic dominance of certain approaches and their epistemic and ontological credentials.