This editorial critically examines the European Union’s rearmament agenda, framed by the Commission’s Readiness 2030 plan and the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) Regulation, in response to geopolitical threats and possible US disengagement. While EU leaders present military investment as essential for safeguarding the ‘European way of life’, the measures proposed reveal a deep disjunction between rhetoric and reality. The plan falls short of establishing genuine strategic autonomy, as NATO remains central and procurement from US industries is reinforced, undermining the claim of independence. Moreover, by relying primarily on national spending and only modest EU financial instruments, the initiative risks entrenching asymmetries between Member States, strengthening national military–industrial complexes rather than building a coordinated European defence framework. By the same token, the legal dimension is equally fraught: the selective use of (national) escape clauses in the Stability and Growth Pact and the reliance on Article 122 TFEU for SAFE highlight the EU’s increasing dependence on creative but legally precarious interpretations. Substantively, the rearmament effort may erode the European social model, as higher defence spending is likely to erode welfare and public investment. Ultimately, the project reflects continuity with past crises: lofty integrationist rhetoric coupled with measures that entrench fragmentation and fiscal imbalance.

It is difficult to disentangle, in EU merger control, between issues of law (subject to full review by the EU courts) and complex economic assessments (controlled for manifest errors). This article discusses, and puts in context, the judgement of the Court of Justice in CK Telecoms. It explains why some of the interpretative choices made by the ECJ open the door to the transformation of the nature and intensity of judicial review in EU merger control. Where the meaning of an interpretation of a legal concept can only be figured out ex post (that is, after performing complex assessments), the control of administrative action may become, de facto, deferential and process-oriented (as opposed to substance-oriented). Leaving constitutional considerations aside, this shift would have the advantage of giving the European Commission the necessary policy space to test new doctrines and act nimbly in a changing economic and technological landscape. On the other hand, it may come at the expense of legal certainty and may not necessarily increase the quality of decision-making.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) is a critical piece of the procedural puzzle of generating a safe social media environment. This article highlights how the DSA’s ambitious provisions regarding content moderation rely on psychological assumptions and inferences about behaviour, yet do so in the absence of extensive empirical behavioural evidence. The difference between how individuals are assumed to behave and evidence on how they actually behave is a crucial element in the complex landscape of effectively moderating content on social media. For this reason, the article sheds light on the value of behavioural research in understanding preferences, incentives and decisions, and the role of such information in interpreting and developing legal provisions. Specifically, through explaining the results of a novel experimental study designed with the DSA in mind, the article offers insights on certain decision-making processes, and how this evidence can steer away from unfounded suppositions to help interpret and apply the DSA against the reality of behaviour.

This article proposes a framework to understand questions of fairness in EU law. It builds on the scholarly literature on the meaning and scope of this concept, to then consider its relevance to legal orders and specifically the European Union’s. Having set out an umbrella definition of fairness as a legal principle, the article applies it to a specific example: namely, the system of border procedures introduced by the new asylum and migration pact. The objective of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it aims to provide a blueprint for discussing issues of fairness in the EU beyond a specific area of law and policy. Secondly, in concretely adapting that blueprint to the specificities of the ‘case study’ analysed in the paper, it sheds light on the degree of its (un)fairness.

The article promotes a new methodological approach to examining the development of European law that significantly advances our understanding of European legal integration. Building on interdisciplinary debates on European law between historians, lawyers, and political and social scientists, the article argues for analysing European law by approaching a legal text from a bottom-up perspective. Our understanding of legal text includes all texts that jurists consider as legal and use in judicialised conflicts.

Examining how a range of actors have used legal text to shape conflicts instead of taking ‘integration’ (or lack thereof) as the ontological lens yields important new insights into the functioning of European law over time. The case studies in this special issue trialling our methodological approach show that, first, certain areas of European law come into view including non-discrimination, the environment, and human rights. Second, social actors in the Member States and beyond were from the beginning involved in co-creating these areas of law, which indicates that European legal integration has always been more than an elite-driven project. Third, actors have mobilised European law for various reasons, often not tied to ‘Europe’. They have used European law to translate a range of political issues into legal questions. Finally, legal knowledge and expertise – and lawyers – have been central to European integration even if this is not reduced to an understanding of the binary relationship between European institutions and the Member States.

EU legal scholarship’s recent ‘turn towards society’ demands new approaches to studying how EU law has been experienced and shaped both at present and in the past. Yet, there has been relatively little research on the engagement of societal actors with European law beyond a narrow focus on litigation. This article looks at a more indirect engagement with legal norms. Using the contested compliance with the EC’s 1982 Seveso directive on industrial safety as a case study, it uncovers the pivotal role that individuals and societal organisations played in procedures that have thus far been considered highly institutionalised: the infringement proceedings started by the European Commission. By tracing how the problem of preparing for disaster came to be regarded by societal actors in Italy and the Netherlands as both a legal and a European problem, it advances an approach showcasing that societal actors experienced EU law less as a separate category and more as part of a broader continuum of solutions to a societal problem.

When the Treaty of Rome (the Treaty) was signed, the legal profession believed it had no impact on its organisation. Yet, from the very beginning, the Directorate General (DG) Internal Market started to work on a directive that would facilitate the circulation of lawyers within the European market. This article is based on the analysis of the 16-year debates leading up to the adoption of the 1977 Directive, which facilitate the effective exercise by lawyers of freedom to provide services. It adopts a bottom-up, actor-centered approach, to understand the role of lawyers and the importance of legal professions in the construction of the common market. Using archival study, interviews and legal analysis, the article shows that the integration of European legal professions cannot be understood without studying the historical structures of each national profession. Moreover, the rallying of lawyers to the European project can only be attributed to the active interpretative work of multipositioned actors.

In legal discourse, the Marshall cases (C-152/84 and C-271/91) have become known as landmark judgements for gender equality. Yet for historians, Helen Marshall’s legal journey is an invitation to make a broader claim of how to approach a landmark case in the history of European law ‘from below’, moving away from a binary analysis of European institutions on the one hand and national structures on the other. Based on original research using a wide range of newspaper articles, published documents from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and archival documents, this article follows Helen Marshall’s legal journey from 1978 to 1993. Using Marshall’s individual role as a ‘heuristic tool’, the article argues that Marshall was a ‘legal entrepreneur’ of her own cause with her actions reflecting the British zeitgeist through the medium of European law. It demonstrates that the legal construction of the Community was by no means a project driven solely by elites. The article further nuances the notion of Britain, as a nation, as an ‘awkward partner’ by highlighting that Marshall, a British citizen, actively contributed to European integration within a complex of other actors.

One of the more remarkable developments in European law is the sudden ‘waking up’ of the European Court of Human Rights in the middle of the 1970s. This article, on the basis of extensive archival materials, follows grassroots actors as they discovered what had been a dormant part of European law, key academics with their own plans for the system and governmental officials debating in the corridors of Strasbourg in order to shed light on this development. The article argues this ‘waking up’ wasn’t the result of a top-down initiative by the Court, but rather the result of a bottom-up movement instigated by a variety of actors. As such, it ties into the recent debates on why and how actors turn to and shape European law (broadly conceived), as well as to why the Court turned active in this period. It makes the case for combining a bottom-up approach with the analysis of governmental policy- and decision-making to examine this change, as from the individual complaints grew a campaign to fundamentally change the entire system of European human rights protection.

Why do national jurists commit what appears to be blatant breaches of EU law even when they intend to comply? Instead of viewing such incidents as mere errors, I suggest one possible way of reconstructing them as meaningful social action. Drawing on Bourdieusian sociology I import the concept of allodoxia as a framework to understand the transplant of ideas about EU law into the national legal field. Allodoxia helps to unpack the structural tension that occurs between the habitual dispositions of the national jurists and the increased pressure from EU. Adding to this, I also use the notion of ontological primacy to conceptualise the symbolic dominance asserted by EU law over the worldview of national jurists, a dominance which obscures a proper understanding of the latter’s actions. I illustrate the argument with a case study of one such blatant ‘error’, when prominent Danish jurists in the late 1980s drafted and defended a buy-Danish clause in the tender materials for a major infrastructure project, the bridge over the strait of Storebælt. By insisting on the ontological parity of European EU law and national EU law respectively, and by using allodoxia as an analytical framework, we can better understand misapplication of law beyond the tradition error-paradigm, adding to our understanding of national reception of EU law. In a broader context, the Article aims to continue and broaden the introduction of a Bourdieusian approach to EU legal scholarship, in particular by drawing attention to the functioning of EU law within Member States.