REILS - Rediscovering European Integration though Legal Storytelling

The research aims at analysing some of the most significant rulings delivered by the Court of Justice between 1954 and 1974 (hereafter: ‘the surveyed rulings’), an essential stage of the European integration process known as the ‘Foundational Period’. These rulings will be examined through the Process-Actors-Narrative Approach, which draws upon the ‘legal storytelling’ methodology, in that it focuses not only on the holdings and legal principles of the surveyed rulings, but also on the (P)rocedural history of the cases, their main (A)ctors (judges, lawyers, parties, etc.) involved in them, as well as the (N)arratives in which these cases fit in, taking into account their historical and legal context. This research will be carried out by combining the typical tools of the jurist (analysis of legislation, case law and legal scholarship) with those of other social sciences, such as archival research (in particular, the consultation of case files) and interviews with people who have information on the cases in question. The research will focus on rulings relevant to two narrative threads: i) Community law as a new legal order and ii) the establishment of the common market. The aim of the project is to re-evaluate, in light of a comprehensive survey of the surveyed rulings, the main narratives of the Foundational Period, which is of paramount importance also for today’s classification of European Union (EU) law. The implementation of the project will be carried out by three Research Units, composed of scholars of EU law (IUS-14), International law (IUS-13), Constitutional Law (IUS-08), and History of Law (IUS-19) and will feature regular meetings aimed at defining the methodology and the division of tasks, at discussing preliminary results, and at presenting and validating the final results. The dissemination of the results of the project will take place via traditional and innovative methods. Traditional dissemination methods will consist in the organisation of conferences, with discussants from other EU Member States to validate the research outputs, as well as the publication of essays in special issues of legal journals or edited volumes by national or international publishers. The innovative dissemination methods will consist in the realisation of podcasts summarizing, in narrative form, the main takeouts of the surveyed judgements and a digital archive of court documents, scholarly publications, etc.. The podcasts and the digital archive will be publicly accessible via a dedicated website.