In this Issue

• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Author: Harm Schepel,Joana Mendes
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12302
• Date: 01 November 2018

EDITORIAL

In this Issue

In July 2013, our founding editor Francis Snyder and his successor, Agustín José Menéndez, wrote the Editorial

marking the transition from one editorship to the next. ‘Change comes very naturally to the European Law Journal’,

they noted, and went on to write:

The contextual approach to the study of law, which is and will remain the core identity of the journal,

is premised on a constant questioning: the questioning of what is taken for granted in legal‐dogmatic

discourses by reference to the perspective and standpoint of other social disciplines, or to put it in

slightly different terms, of other ways of seeing the law. Indeed, it seems to us that profound

changes will result from asking anew what law in context means, and what it entails.

We start our editorship with the perfectly conservative affirmation of this intellectual programme of constant

questioning. We would like to see the ELJ rattle and shake shared understandings and dominant discourses, and that

most certainly includes the continuous unsettling of the shared understandings and discourses the ELJ itself engenders.

If there ever were to be such a thing as a format for the ‘classic ELJ article’,our mission will have failed.

The ‘Menéndez years’of the ELJ have coincided with a profound and lasting crisis of the Union and much of what

it was supposed to stand for: unity in diversity, economic prosperity and solidarity, the rule of law. The crisis has also

laid bare the complacency—and at times, the complicity—of European legal scholarship. The pages of this Journal

have hosted many important contributions on the Union's crises, but none perhaps as urgent and compelling as

Menéndez's Editorials. As the most visible manifestations of his stewardship, we will find occasion to revisit and

reconsider these soon. The digital archives of the ELJ contain the more obscure and even more impressive evidence

of the Menéndez years: hundreds upon hundreds of pages' worth of comments, advice and suggestions on

manuscripts. Though authors may have been exasperated at times, we are sure they will agree that their work

became all the better for Agustín's selfless labours. We are delighted to announce that Agustín has accepted to

remain closely tied to the Journal and join the Board of Editors.

Though we cannot claim any credit for it, we are all the more pleased to introduce this issue. Gareth Davies asks

whether there is a particularly good reason to accept the Court's assertion of interpretative monopoly over the Treaties.

Finding none, he embraces the concept of ‘interpretative pluralism’as a way out of over‐constitutionalisation, judicial

resistance of national courts, and impoverished political discourse. What he seeks to achieve is to ‘reprioritise the

agreement embodied in the Treaties, rather than the institutions around it.’Robert Schütze delves into history to see

how far the original understanding of the famous Dassonville formula diverges from modern accepted wisdom that sees

it as a radical departure from contemporaneous scripts for market integration. Karin van Leeuwen's historical

reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding early Dutch preliminary references, including the one that gave rise

to the iconic judgment in Van Gend en Loos, seeks to re‐emphasize structure—the Dutch open economy—over the

agency of entrepreneurial Euro‐lawyers. In the process of doing EU legal history, both Schütze and van Leeuwen

express strong—if different—ideas on how best to do EU legal history. They both also offer a useful reminder of how

much of market integration is a matter of mundane customs forms, declarations and certificates, a point current Brexit

negotiations will not let us forget. Roman Guski's essay is a systems‐theoretical analysis, as playful as it is insightful, of

the elusive concept of the ‘abuse of law’. The notion's inherent paradoxical nature—how to lawfully decide in law that

DOI: 10.1111/eulj.12302

356 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Eur Law J. 2018;24:356–357.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/eulj