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21 German L.J. 1 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/germlajo21 and id is 1 raw text is: German Law Journal (2020), 21, pp. 1-4 CAMI DGI doi:10.1017/gilj.2019.86 INVRST E Michele Finck* and Floris de Witte** A I ntroductio European Union law is an endangered discipline. To some extent, it is becoming impossible to be a generalist EU lawyer-whose expertise spans the many different policy fields that EU law engages in. EU law is, to use its own parlance, both widening and deepening very quickly-whereby whole new fields such as animal rights, digital contracts or criminal law theory are drawn into its orbit. The study of European Union law is, at the same time, becoming more comfortable with cross- disciplinary work, and is showing a renewed focus on critical engagement, empirical work, and historical analysis. These changes take place against the backdrop of a European Union that is stumbling from crisis to crisis-even if, perhaps, the language and rhetoric of crisis has accompanied the integra- tion process from the very start. The answers given to the Euro-crisis and the refugee crisis-using the word solution instead would be too generous-the rule of law crisis, the general rise in Euro- skepticism and disillusion with integration feed into a process that is highly volatile and unpre- dictable. It is becoming increasingly difficult not just to understand what is happening, but also why it is happening, and what all of it means for the future of the integration project. One thing is clear to us, however. This moment of flux is meaningful in and of itself-and it is being used as a catalyst for a discussion about the orientation of the integration process, but also of the role of the academy in it.1 It feels, in short, very much like the end of one part of the process of integration; and the beginning of another one. The German Law Journal thought that, with the new decade starting, it would be a good idea to take stock, to do a sort of vox pop of European Union law scholarship about the direction of inte- gration. We have asked colleagues-young and established; generalists and specialists-for their take on the main challenge for the EU in the 2020s. That's all we asked. We specified that the contributions be short, but left the topic, style, argument and approach in the hands of the authors. In doing so, we hoped to unearth not just a diversity of topics-plenty of challenges to choose from, it seems-but also a diversity of styles, types of engagement, and an interesting synergy and conflict between the different contributions. And so it transpired. In this special issue you will find all the contributions. The range is as we had hoped-from how to tackle emerging policy challenges of computational intelligence and climate change to rec- onceptualizations of the normative underpinnings of European integration. Some contributions stress the need to rediscover who we, the citizens, are, and how we can live together in Europe, and in the world, of 2020. Others offer new ways for academics to engage with integration, while others yet stress the distributive consequences of integration and emerging contradictions in specific fields of EU policy. We have seen a surprising amount of focus on institutional change-pulling *Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. -Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. 1FLORIS DE WITTE, RE:GENERATION EUROPE (2020); Antoine Vauchez et al., Manifesto for the Democratization of Europe, http://tdem.eu/en/manifesto/ (last visited Nov. 29, 2019); Alberto Alemanno, The Good Lobby, http://thegoodlobby.eu/ (last visited Nov. 29, 2019). © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the German Law Journal. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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