Avbelj, Matej; Davies, Gareth --- "Introduction" [2018] ELECD 383; in Davies, Gareth; Avbelj, Matej (eds), "Research Handbook on Legal Pluralism and EU Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018) 1

Book Title: Research Handbook on Legal Pluralism and EU Law

Editor(s): Davies, Gareth; Avbelj, Matej

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN: 9781786433084

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Introduction

Author(s): Avbelj, Matej; Davies, Gareth

Number of pages: 8

Abstract/Description:

This book has two purposes. One is, as befits a handbook, to be a guide to the scholarship on legal pluralism and EU law. Legal pluralism is not just a fact of EU life, but one that is central to its existence and development. There is hardly any branch of its law, from the most constitutional to the most functional, in which the practical questions arising out of legal diversity, and the principled questions about how to deal with and understand them, are not important. Our hope is that if a young, or not so young, legal researcher realizes that they need to engage with these questions seriously, and turns to a colleague or supervisor for advice, that colleague or supervisor should be able to take this book off their shelf and say: ‘Read this, go through the doorways it opens, and follow the paths it indicates, and you will find what you need to know.’ The second purpose of the book is to take things further. Not so many years ago there was an explosion of interest in constitutional pluralism, as a new and powerful paradigm for the relations between constitutions and supreme courts in the EU. Thanks to now classic works by some of the leading scholars of EU law, the idea of constitutional pluralism entered the EU lexicon and has become central to attempts to explain and critique constitutional integration. Several chapters in the book revisit these classic works, discussing, expanding on and sometimes criticizing their ideas.