The three foci of UNITE explained above also display in three distinct Work Packages (WP).
1)WP1: Identifying the Embodiment of Different Political Philosophies in EU: Although the Covid-19 crises started a couple of months after I had commenced my work on the UNITE project, the objective of identifying different political philosophies in different fields of EU law proved to be a fruitful exercise, which ultimately lead to two publications in the first year of my Marie Curie Fellowship. First, and inspired by the readings on various political philosophies concerned with forms of distributive forms of justice, I published a case-note in the highly-prestigious, peer-revied, open access Common Market Law Review on a gender equality case dealing with questions on mother’s pensions Second, and due to my efforts to re-connect with my networks at the Court of Justice of the European Union (as part of the objectives of UNITE), I wrote an article with the former British judge Christopher Vajda on a range of judgements in the realm of EU external relations and trade law and the role of certain court judgement therein.
2)WP2: Deciphering the Cultural Narratives Underlying the CJEU’s Case-Law: The result of working package two has been an article laying out the methodological and theoretical foundations of a cultural study of EU law and displaying the value-added of such method for the disentanglement of various narratives in the case-law of the ECJ on the basis of various cases. After presenting a draft version of this article in an EU Law Seminar at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in May of 2022, the editors of the European Law Open (who had been part of the audience) encouraged me to submit the paper. This is what I eventually did: I submitted the article (with the title: ‘Unearthing Political Theories in the Interpretation of EU Law’), laying out a novel way of reading EU law based on a method grounded in literary, anthropological, and philosophical insights to the European Law Open (which is open access journal).
3)WP3: Examining the Cultural Narratives’ Potentiality of Cultural Re(Production): Throughout working package three, I mainly engaged with the work of cultural legal studies scholars, such as Paul Kahn (analyzing the impact of legal language on law’s social legitimacy and people’s way of being) as well as the work of Ulrich Haltern and my former supervisor Joseph Weiler (both of whom have investigated the socio-economic meaning of the case-law of the Court of Justice of the EU). Against the background of this research focus of UNITE, it was a particular pleasure and honor for me to have been invited to a conference on the jurisprudence of Paul Kahn in Glasgow in March of 2022 (‘Law and Political Imagination. Workshop on the Jurisprudence of Paul W. Kahn’). At this conference, I presented a draft paper laying out my initial thoughts on the cultural force of the law, which will in its more elaborate forms be published next year (2023) in a symposium issue on the jurisprudence of Paul Kahn in the German Law Journal (an open access journal). Furthermore, I was also particularly pleased that, amongst others, Ulrich Haltern and Joseph Weiler had agreed to come to the final conference on the UNITE project organized at iCourts (in July of 2022). Due to Covid-19, the conference unfortunately had to be postponed to spring of 2023.
