Going beyond the wordlessness of EU law

Abstract

This essay explores what can be learned from understanding EU law as a language in the literary sense of being a set of resources for manifold ethical and political expression and social action. As a contribution to new methodological approaches to studying EU law, it will propose a method highlighting how EU law can be studied in such a way by paying attention to the various linguistic and structural features of a legal text while, at the same time, diversifying the rationales through which we understand and make sense of such textual features. The Sayn–Wittgenstein decision will serve as point of reference in order to illustrate the value-added of this new theoretical and methodological insight to understanding EU law. This essay will conclude that it is not only worth taking the language of EU law seriously because it allows us to ’see’ more in the law, but also because it enables us to elevate the deeper ideas about Europe to the surface of the language we use when writing and speaking about EU law and to thereby contribute to a more productive dialogue about the foundations and future of the EU polity.

Keywords

• EU constitutional law
• law and literature
• political philosophy
• cultural study of law
• law and language