This paper sets out a research agenda for EU legal geography. It identifies some central traits to the project of legal geography, a relatively new and increasingly populated interdisciplinary space that links legal studies with geography. While the EU and the project of integration appear to offer particularly rich soil for the legal geographer, very little attention has been paid to the ways in which the nature, structure and lived experience of the EU can be explained from a spatial and temporal perspective. For many reasons, as will be elaborated, this is a shame. Most crucially, perhaps, there is a growing realisation in EU studies in general that the authority and legitimacy of the EU depends, more and more, on how it is experienced by its citizens. Legal geography, with its spatial awareness and focus on the way in which space, time and law are co-constituted, offers a lens, language and conceptual framework to fill this void. While EU lawyers have occasionally and haphazardly ventured into the terrain of legal geography, much work is to be done. This could take the form of methodological, empirical, or conceptual work, and would offer a new dimension to existing accounts of European integration and to the central concepts in doctrinal and constitutional work in EU legal studies.

Europe’s aggravating housing crisis lies in the blind spots of law. While central in constructing housing both as a home and as an asset, law bears the task of mediating between housing’s multiple – social, economic, and cultural – dimensions. However, inner-legal fragmentation and a legal imaginary of property, the nation state, and its welfare system have depoliticized, deflected and rendered inaccessible the ‘housing question’. Turning to tenancy contract law in particular, this article argues that the ‘social’ orientation of this early example of a ‘materialised’ field of contract law is not only ill-suited to reflect the recent structural shifts in the housing market brought about through financialisation. Tenancy contract law has effectively taken a conservative drift by claiming to adequately administer the bilateral landlord–tenant relation while being insensitive to macro-level developments. Tenancy contract law reindividualises tenant responsibility in the eye of hardships whose roots lie outside the contractual sphere and thereby furthers, rather than curtails, neoliberal housing policies. As a reaction, the article proposes political economy as a conceptual vantage point from which to develop a ‘holistic housing law’. Such a perspective combines a concern for democratic and collective agency with careful attention to law’s tacit and technical role in shaping the flow of finance and the techniques of landlords’ governmentality. Part of this is a ‘transformative tenancy law’, to be reformulated to protect not against landlord bargaining power in the first place but against a hegemonic and expansive market rationality that structurally corrupts the social and material meaning of housing.

This paper aims to question the dominance of human rights as the primary normative framework for European social media regulation, and academic research in this field. Analysing EU legislation and recent ECJ cases, it shows that issues like discriminatory content moderation, profiling, and promotion of stereotypes cannot adequately be addressed within a human rights framework. The centrality of individual rights in the EU legal regime not only fails to address collective issues, like platforms’ influence on culture and social norms, but cannot even offer effective, equal protection to individuals. In policy debates, the depoliticised and individualistic language of human rights can legitimise corporate activities and downplay important questions about the political economy of this privatised, highly-concentrated, advertiser-funded industry. The paper also considers interpretations of human rights as structural conditions or collective values, and argues that they cannot fully overcome the limitations discussed here. Given the entrenched role of fundamental rights in EU law, critics of social media cannot avoid relying on them. However, academics should also seek to develop more explicitly political critiques, based on alternative normative visions.

This Article considers the role of ideas in shaping law and policy processes, serving to facilitate certain actions or approaches while curtailing others. Using the development of the EU’s governance approach to online service providers and platforms, this Article demonstrates how ordoliberalism as a set of beliefs regarding the regulation of market activity through law have shaped the understanding of appropriate measures for combating hybrid threats such as disinformation. Highlighting the origins of the E-Commerce Directive and the influence of ordoliberalism in the application of a regulated self-regulation model, the Article explores how ordoliberal philosophical ideas have influenced programme and policy level ideas concerning EU cyberspace governance as it relates to online platform activities. Even where there has been discursive change regarding the role of online platforms in contributing to an environment of insecurity, there has nevertheless been ideational continuity in the approach to their regulation, dictating the legal response in the Digital Services Act.

The introductory article sets out the background and the content of the Symposium on ‘Law and the Production of Precarious Work in Europe’. The analysis builds on the premise that European (EU) law, together with international and national law, is constitutive of precarious forms of work and work relations in different national and local contexts. The Symposium takes issue with the specific legal frameworks and regimes that are related to structuring various forms of precarious and exploitable labour, by exploring how (EU) law orders the world of work through legal regimes and regulatory frameworks governing specific forms of labour mobility across borders, as well as by looking at the other components of the structures and institutional interactions underlying the broader political economy where precarious forms of work materialise.

This article unpacks some severe forms of exploitation of workers, resulting from the use of free provision of services for purposes that it was not intended to fulfil, under internal market law. It explores how this evolution of posting relates to the existence of a market resting only on the international assignment of workers, and proposes that the European Union (EU) takes steps to limit or prohibit assignment of labour, especially in the sectors (agriculture, meat sector, construction) where posting of workers, as some recent cases show, leads to extreme forms of exploitation that can be tagged as slavery.

Transparency is widely acknowledged as a core value in the governance of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. However, scholarship on AI technologies and their regulation often casts this need for transparency in terms of requirements for the explanation of algorithmic outputs and/or decisions produced with the involvement of opaque black-box AI systems. Our article argues that this discourse has re-interpreted and reshaped transparency in fundamental ways away from its original meaning. The target of transparency – in most cases, the provider of AI software – determines and shapes what is made visible to the outside world, and there is no external check on the validity and accuracy of such mediated accounts and explanations, opening transparency up for manipulation. Through a theoretically informed and critical analysis of the transparency provisions in the European Union’s AI Act proposal, the article shows that the substitution of transparency with mediated explanations faces important technical constraints, creates opportunities and incentives for both providers and public-sector users of AI systems to adopt opaque practices, and reinforces secrecy requirements that gag accountability in practice. An approach to transparency as disclosure thus becomes necessary, even if not sufficient in and of itself, to ensure the accountable development and use of AI technologies in the European Union. Transparency needs to be reclaimed as a core concept, accountability tailored and reinforced and the necessity for secrecy re-examined and cordoned off.

The Rejoinder offers a first response to the reviews of The Redress of Law, published in this issue of ELO, and further pursues certain lines of theoretical inquiry in engagement with the reviewers’ suggestions and objections.

On the occasion of the launch of the European Law Open, this article analyses two policy documents of the European Union (EU) on its ambitions in peace mediation, to think about what it could mean for European law to be open to the world. Reading these documents – ‘the Concepts’ – through the lens of the theme that I have been assigned for this opening issue – ‘Europe in the world’ – one discerns an outward-looking EU searching for a greater role in the international field of peace mediation. One also sees instances of eurocentrism: a set of assumptions about the superiority of European (or ‘western’) ways of knowing and doing. In these Concepts, the EU envisages sending EU mediators into the world – either to mediate themselves or to support mediation efforts by others. The Concepts also contain increasingly long lists of EU values to be carried along and distributed during peace mediation. But the Concepts do not consider that in the countries where the EU mediator arrives, this backpack filled with normative baggage may bring other associations. Without more explicit recognition of the EU’s obstinate baggage, the EU is unlikely to be an effective peace mediator or, indeed, a credible global actor. More generally, critical reflexivity could help the EU to address the lingering Eurocentric tendencies that these Concepts reveal. Such critical questioning by the EU of its own assumptions, as well as learning from perspectives from outside the EU or the past, can be a process of focusing on Europe in order to decentre it. That, then, could also be a mission for this bold new European journal.