@article{2026:leinosandberg:70_year,
title = {‘70 Years of EU Law’ – The Politics of a Professional Language},
year = {2026},
note = {Planck Institute in Heidelberg in January 2024 to discuss and
celebrate ‘70 Years of EU Law’ based on a book written by lawyers
working in the Commission Legal Service. The book invites us to look
backwards at the great achievements of the past. It treats law as an
essential, indeed quite indispensable, tool of the integration
project. The article argues that examining more carefully European
Union (EU) law as a professional language might enable us to see how
policy goals turn into rules that we consider binding or authoritative
and that make us believe in the beneficiality of whatever is being
proposed as representative of ‘integration’. In addition to
celebrating the role of lawyers in solving problems, we need to remain
mindful of their contribution to creating problems; or defining what
should be treated as a problem. Legal work is about making choices;
and those choices privilege some values or interests over other values
or interests. In the absence of Treaty change, it is the ingenuity of
EU lawyers that has kept the integration going. And while this
ingenuity has enabled the EU to respond to some very real challenges,
it has also led to the capture of Treaty interpretation by a
professional elite whose biases are hidden behind an impenetrable
idiomatic language. This paper makes the argument for a broader
grammar of EU law that would translate the choices between priorities
into political terms and stop seeing democracy as a threat to the
European Union, but instead, allow subjecting its legal and policy
choices to critical debate.},
journal = {Zeitschrift für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht / Heidelberg Journal of International Law},
pages = {59--84},
author = {Leino-Sandberg, Päivi},
volume = {86},
number = {1}
}