Judicial independence in the context of rule of law backsliding – a systematisation of case law from the Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights – classic dimensions of objective and subjective independence of judges – a new third dimension: the right of judges to their own independence as final safeguard

Introduction to the special section – Actors of EU law – Activities of EU actors – Role definition in EU constitutional law – Constitutional theory – Separation of powers –Relationship between public authorities and individuals – Institutional actors – Private actors – Lobbyists – Law and practice – Legal doctrine – Research methods in EU law – Importance of theoretical frameworks in defining the parameters of legal research

Methodological choices in the legal study of the role of EU institutions – The so-called doctrinal legal method is appropriate, provided that it includes the analysis of key elements of non-legal institutional practice – Simple distinction between the study of ‘law in the books’ and that of ‘law in action’ to be qualified – Doctrinal legal scholarship is meaningful only when it acknowledges and incorporates a certain amount of ‘law in action’

Private actors as non-institutional, and therefore often overlooked, participants in EU legal processes – A specific focus on their role as private regulators – Private actors such as companies, contracting parties and industry associations, play a pivotal regulatory role in the EU legal order – Classifying the existing legal research on private regulation – A legal-doctrinal approach towards private regulation also needed – Theoretical background of a novel legal-doctrinal perspective on private actors – Addressing the most pressing practical methodological challenges – Specific focus on the problem of accessibility and the difficulty of understanding and interpreting private regulation doctrinally

Putting ‘lobbyists’ and ‘lobbying’ on the EU law map – acknowledging that there is little interest in lobbying by EU legal research – explaining why EU lawyers and especially constitutional law scholars should be interested in lobbying – presenting a framework to study lobbyists as regulated actors under EU law – considering the merits of ethnographically-oriented socio-legal research and the ‘new legal realism’ as methods of studying lobbyists and lobbying.

Functional comparison of administrative laws – Development of EU administrative law based on a state-matrix of general principles – Jürgen Schwarze’s approach – Choices of object, objectives, method, assumptions and normative implications – Structural features of the EU administration versus the binary liberty-authority of core principles of national administrative law – Liberal normativist approach – Contemporary critical examination of the legacy of comparative administrative law

Difference between social science analyses of law and legal analyses – Theatre metaphor to understand the difference – Internal and external points of view – Necessity for legal analysis to use materials lying outside the classical pyramid of formal sources – Overview of the spectrum of legal research – Legally relevant texts and practices – Interdisciplinary approaches to law and lawyers’ disciplinary edge.