Democratic Empowerment through Euro - Law ?

More than in any other sub-fields of European studies, the study of law-andpolitics in the European Union owes a great deal to U.S. scholarship. Given the differences in structure of the academic fields on both sides of the Atlantic, and the early development of socio-legal studies in the United States (which still has no equivalent in Europe), American scholars have been the first to challenge the “legal-only-based” narrative of the ECJ’s role (see Cohen, Vauchez, 2007). At a time when European law professors were busy discussing whether the nascent body of EC law was indeed an authentic and autonomous legal order, U.S. scholars were already engaging in empirical studies on the political role of the European Court of Justice. After the initial stream of research initiated in the early 1960s by Stuart Scheingold’s Law and politics in Western European integration (Ph.D, University of Berkeley, 1963), a second wave spread in the 1980s with Joseph Weiler’s seminal contributions. Those were twofold. First, they suggested the ECJ’s normative supranationalism was an alternative to the shortcomings of inter-state decision-making (1981); second, they insisted on the importance of the Court’s various “interlocutors” in strengthening this judicial path of integration (1994). In a context in which the classic IR opposition between neo-functionalists and intergovernmentalist was still vivid within American scholarship, Weiler’s insights became instrumental to the renewed interest of neo-functionalist scholars in the European Court. After Burley-Slaughter and Mattli’s paper on the political theory of legal integration (Mattli, Slaughter), a whole stream of scholars (Alter, Caporaso, Conant, Mattli, Stone, etc...) have investigated the judicial contribution to Europeanization processes. Strikingly enough, this now important sub-field of European studies (see de Burca, 2005; Conant, 2007) has to this day remained heavily dominated by American political scientists. For sure, many European legal scholars have contributed to the study of European law-incontext (Chalmers, Joerges, Schepel, Shaw...). But as far as political science is concerned, most of the methodological innovations –particularly the construction of large-n data set of judicial decisionsand of the theoretical ambitions have come from the other side of the Atlantic.