D Cowan and D Wincott, eds, Exploring the Legal in Socio-legal Studies (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Chapter 7, pp. 157-182 1 Bringing the Technical into the Socio-legal: The Metaphors of Law and Legal Scholarship of a 21 st Century European Union Dr Paul James Cardwell and Prof Tamara Hervey * School of Law, University of Sheffield, Bartolomé House, Winter Street, Sheffield S3 7ND, UK 1 Introduction The narrative form - particularly as an origin story and (folk) history - remains a potent constitutive mechanism for creating and sustaining communities, including legal communities. There is a way to tell the story of EU law or the roles of law in EU integration that begins from a faith in law in the 1950s, turns away from law (to governance) in the 1990s, and, after 2008, either returns to law, or even hyper-legalism, or, in the alternative, eschews law as a means to solve Europe’s problems. This story may even be the ‘received wisdom’ as to EU law’s foundations and development. It is at least a recognised dominant narrative. It is a narrative of both EU law, and the study of EU law. Put into the terms of this book, the dominant narrative therefore proceeds along the lines of a focus on the ‘legal’; a focus on the ‘socio’; followed by a return to a focus on the ‘legal’ (either as a return to faith in the legal, or as a rejection of the legal (S Cowan in this collection)). EU law was initially seen, and studied, as technical legal doctrine; there followed a turn to socio-legal scholarship of EU law, where law was understood through socio-legal approaches; and more recently there is either a return to legal doctrine, or a rejection altogether of law as an important factor in EU studies or the future of the EU. Of course, to cast the story in those terms implies a disconnection between the dyad ‘legal’-’socio’ - a relationship which scholars of the sociology of law have puzzled at for generations. Rather than engaging directly with that question, for the purposes of this chapter, we will accept the distinction as a useful device. We want to suggest a different way of telling the story of EU law and EU legal studies, particularly the story of its turn to (and away from) the socio-legal. We suggest that attention to ‘legal technicality’ (the ‘legal’ of ‘socio-legal’ as the title of this book has it) has much to offer towards such a retelling. What if we seek to uncover the ‘legal’ in the ‘socio-legal’, and vice versa? How might attention to legal technicality as a socially understood phenomenon enrich EU socio-legal scholarship? How does the story go then? As well as demonstrating the method of ‘telling’ and ‘retelling’, we also investigate and interrogate narration as a socio-legal method(ology). In recognising the provisionality of narrative, what do we reveal about the limitations and the promise of the ‘legal’ or the ‘socio- legal’, for instance in the ‘project’ of European Union? And what does such a retelling offer in terms of future research agendas for (EU) law? * We are grateful to the participants at the workshops on The Methods of European Integration, Central University Budapest, June 2012; the panel on Methods of Integration at the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) Annual Conference, Passau, September 2012; and the workshops Exploring the Legal in Socio-Legal Studies, LSE, September 2012; Theorising Integration and Governance after the Lisbon Treaty and During Crisis, Sheffield, July 2013; The New Intergovernmentalism, Budapest, November 2013, at which versions of this paper were delivered, especially Dave Cowan, Uwe Puetter, Dermot Hodson and Simon Bulmer. We are also grateful to the editors, and to Pablo Castillo Ortiz, Niamh Nic Shuibhne and Nina Boeger for their useful comments and suggestions, although we were not able to incorporate all of those in this version of the paper.