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Bardutzky, Samo; Fahey, Elaine --- "The subjects and objects of EU law: exploring a research platform" [2017] ELECD 923; in Bardutzky, Samo; Fahey, Elaine (eds), "Framing the Subjects and Objects of Contemporary EU Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 1

Book Title: Framing the Subjects and Objects of Contemporary EU Law

Editor(s): Bardutzky, Samo; Fahey, Elaine

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781786435736

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: The subjects and objects of EU law: exploring a research platform

Author(s): Bardutzky, Samo; Fahey, Elaine

Number of pages: 28

Abstract/Description:

This edited volume explores how we frame the subjects and objects of contemporary European Union (EU) law. The inquiry as to the subjects and objects of Public International Law (PIL) is one long dismissed as fruitless (e.g. Higgins, 1994). Nevertheless, it is a more revealing inquiry in EU law, which has explicitly sought to differentiate itself as a new legal order of PIL with a distinctive framing of its subjects and objects. As the EU’s internal and external competences have evolved, significant changes surround the subjects and objects of contemporary EU law. It may increasingly capture a broader range of actors and interests, intentionally or otherwise. The subjects and objects of EU regulatory frameworks thus raise fundamental issues as to the rule of law as well as to the EU’s legitimacy in the wider world. While there may be hundreds of years of work across disciplines on the self as subject, the object as an entity often appears a neglected field of inquiry. The EU treaties and EU law jurisprudence alike reveal a quantifiable panoply of interests, actors, objects and subjects, scattered across them. The collaborative research effort presented in this volume is linked to three primary motifs or considerations in how we frame the subjects and objects of EU law: transformations, the external-internal nexus and crises as to EU law. It confronts the question: how should we understand the dialectic between the subjects and objects in contemporary EU law? Can the objects of EU law so readily become its subjects? What are the normative parameters of the shift from subject to object and object to subject? How are new narratives understood within this dialectic? Keywords: EU law, jurisprudence, EU integration, Transformations, Crises, CJEU, EU international relations, public international law, subjects, objects