In his chapter Nicholas Haagensen seeks to articulate the processes of legal construction and elaboration in a novel area of EU financial and monetary law. Using qualitative methods, he explains how EU lawyers, first, built a novel legal structure – the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) – during the Eurozone crisis in the years 2010 to 2012, and second, how they defended their construction before the CJEU. While attempting to resolve the legal tensions arising between the EU legal order and the ESM legal framework, the CJEU backed the mutation of Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) with its ruling in the Pringle judgement. The establishment of the ESM – an international financial institution – outside EMU, while still being intimately connected to the EU legal order, instigated a mutation of EMU through the introduction of international law modalities into its EU law foundations. Drawing on interviews with lawyers from the European Commission, the Council, the European Parliament and the ECB, as well as the legal observations of all the parties to the Pringle case, the chapter explains and maps the process of legal construction and elaboration of changes to the EMU legal structure.

Legal praxeology is the perspective that claims to consider the law through the practices that take the same law as their point of reference. It occupies the space that exists between formalism and sociologism. Legal praxeology is the approach that takes law seriously in all its formal and sociological depth. This means that it considers absurd the pretention of dealing with law while ignoring what its practitioners take as essential to their activities, that is, the rules; but it finds it equally indispensable to deal with these rules and the activities that refer to them through their modes of accomplishment. Legal praxeology does not aspire to theorizing, if the latter is understood as the search for abstract generalization in which to subsume the infinite variety of cases. Particular cases are studied ethnographically in order to elicit the mechanisms that are specific to how they unfold, including what is linked to the law as followed by both its professional and lay practitioners. Legal praxeology’s descriptive attention is concerned with the methods proper to the people concerned. One could speak of an interest in “legal ethnomethods.”

Equipped with a vocabulary to do justice to the performative dimensions of social scientific knowledge production, this chapter revisits the controversial study of sentencing disparities introduced in Chapter 1. Here, I emphasize the performative effects of statistical forms of ordering and analysing judicial decision-making. What are the consequences of treating judicial cases as bundles of legal and social characteristics? How is the promise of “equality before the Law” operationalized? How is the law itself reconfigured as a result of this analysis? What kind of population – of cases, of individuals – does this analyses presuppose? Together, these questions bring us closer to zooming in on a crucial performativity of social-scientific accounts of judicial practices, especially those assisted by quantitative measurement and statistical analyses. Disaggregating cases into case- and defendant “factors” and portraying criminal law as a machine distributing justice over an internally stratified population, this approach produces a reality the judges do not recognize as their own. Hence, this chapter also comments on the methodological limitations of statistical analyses in the study of actually existing, concrete work practices, demonstrating how such methodological approach black-boxes judicial decision-making and disaggregates cases into “factors”.

This chapter concludes by emphasizing the multiple character of the law. Summarizing the multiple beings of the law as they have appeared in this book – the law as a distribution machine, the law as a narrative practice, the law as a matter of shuffling documents, the law as a matter of temporal ordering and folding – this chapter raises the question how we may make sense of this multiplicity. Here, I argue we must refuse to reduce these multiplicities to one preferred abstraction. Instead of such hyper-explanations, I argue we must retain multiplicities in order to justice to law’s multi-scalar, multi-temporal, and non-local character. In order to do so, I suggest we think of the law as a hyper-object. The notion of the hyper-object forces us to situate and account for our collaborations with this strange being, so that we will never be able to claim we have apprehended the law in its totality, yet we need not sacrifice description entirely. Such a conception calls for situated accounts, and remains sensitive to the fact that social and legal life is always ongoing, never not concrete, irreducibly multiple.