Reflections on methods and interdisciplinarity

In this chapter, we reflect on methods and interdisciplinarity in legal research, and on how context matters in this. We distinguish between internal and contextual perspectives on law, and, within the former, between formalist and substantialist approaches. We argue that interdisciplinarity entails methodological pluralism, and that contextualism can act as a tool generating a deeper and different understanding of the law than formalist research could produce. As the contributions in this handbook show, in the study of EU law, formalism and substantialism are supplemented, or perhaps increasingly replaced, by contextualism. This indicates an increase in interdisciplinary approaches in the study of law in general and of European law in particular. In this chapter we will elaborate on this idea of the embeddedness of scholarship and attempt to sketch, with a very broad brush, an intellectual history of EU legal scholarship which shows its journey from formalism to being more open to contextualism.