Lawyers, judges and scholars often see the domain of the family as distinctive, namely as affective rather than instrumental, sharing rather than distributive, distinguished from the functioning of both the state and the market by its altruism, intimacy and sacredness. They also often consider family law as exceptional, as occupying a distinctive domain and operating differently than its private law counterparts such as contracts, torts and property law or its public ones such as criminal, administrative and constitutional law.1 We begin from the premise, however, that the law that regulates and shapes the experiences and situations of members of a family arises, too, in these other domains. Family law encompasses not just the rules and doctrines associated with the formation, operation and dissolution of families (traditional family law) but also laws of the market and the state that regulate and shape the definition and operation of families.2

While witnessing the dismantling of a rule-based multilateral trading system, trade negotiators and diplomats in the US and the EU have revamped trade liberalisation through free trade agreements (FTAs). The failed TPP, TTIP, the renegotiation of NAFTA, and the rise of the Pacific Alliance in Latin America have put trade policy under scrutiny by media and civil society. As a result, trade negotiators have acquired new legal expertise in administrative and investment law to justify the need for innovative FTAs. As part of their limited negotiating capital, trade negotiators and diplomats have deployed neutral concepts of transparency and efficiency to justify the incorporation of domestic preferences. An analysis of the EU’s four Asian FTA transparency commitments offers insights into how national transparency mandates, together with geopolitical realities of international trade regimes, constitute the bargaining power of trade negotiators. The politicisation of legal expertise and trade negotiator’s negotiating capital creates a set of constraints and agency that allows for wiggle room in articulating, bargaining, and drafting what appears as neutral transparency provisions in FTAs.

The article provides a general introduction to the book. It introduces the readers to the new strand of empirical and interdisciplinary scholarship that has emerged over the past decade in the study of the EU law, lawyers and the Court of Justice of the European Union. Taking stock of the on-going ‘methodological turn’ in this field, it presents the new interdisciplinary research strategies and empirical material mobilized to analyze the Court of Justice of the European Union. Altogether, the twelve case-studies cut away from the top-down approach to the EU law and the CJEU, and allow for a more localized and fine-grained observation of the socio-legal actors and practices actors involved in CJEU case law. As the introduction moves beyond mainstream legal scholarship and ‘grand narratives’ of legal integration, the edited volume provides a more historically informed and sociologically grounded account of the EU law’s (unequal) embeddedness in Europe’s economies et societies.