This book develops a contextual approach to European constitutional law, and to free movement law in particular. Such approaches take into account not only the internal legal perspective reflected in the official justificatory discourse supporting legal decisions, but also an external dimension related to the institutional environment in which the law is applied. This external dimension–which can be understood by reference to studies that look at the law from the outside as the subject of sociological, economic or philosophical analyses–is usually ignored, or not addressed systematically by st ... More

This book develops a contextual approach to European constitutional law, and to free movement law in particular. Such approaches take into account not only the internal legal perspective reflected in the official justificatory discourse supporting legal decisions, but also an external dimension related to the institutional environment in which the law is applied. This external dimension–which can be understood by reference to studies that look at the law from the outside as the subject of sociological, economic or philosophical analyses–is usually ignored, or not addressed systematically by studies that adopt the internal perspective. By incorporating insights from the study of this external dimension into the traditional modes of legal discourse and analysis–in effect, by internalizing these 'external' elements into legal theory and practice–contextual approaches lead to the development of both more complete descriptive models and more attractive normative proposals regarding the law, and EU law in particular, than de–contextualized approaches. Such an approach is applied to the EU fundamental freedoms in the present monograph, which is thus able to present a general theory of the EU fundamental freedoms that is able to make descriptive sense, formally and substantively, of EU free movement law at both its most general–where formal common structures seem to be undeniable, and a minimum common substantive content can be identified–and its most detailed levels–where substantive variations and greater normative specification seem to exist.