Legal Order, Legal Pluralism, Fundamental Principles. Europe and Its Law in Three Concepts

The essay analyses the way in which the concepts of legal order, legal pluralism and fundamental rights have been used to describe (and decide) what European integration is (and what it ought to be) from the perspective of the law. The essay does not provide a legal theory but limits itself to investigating how certain concepts have been employed to justify legal decisions and to construct legal theories. The juridical discourse on Europe is examined to identify some trends in contemporary legal culture: the decline of a tradition of legal thought, ‘legal dogmatics,’ the vanishing of the distinction between internal and external law (between domestic law and international law, and between positive law and morality), the growing importance of fundamental rights discourse, the centrality of balancing test, the widespread criticism of legal science’s claim to neutralità and the consequent normative turn affecting legal scholarship.