The Law of the Everyday: Europe’s Method

In the fall of 2024 at the EUI, we, together with a group of young researchers, ran a seminar on European Law of the Everyday. The group endeavoured to explore the role of law or lack thereof in the stories told by Ben Judah in his book This is Europe: The Way We Live Now published in 2023. Explicitly inspired by the tales and dramas of Boccaccio’s Decameron, the book turns from the depiction of fourteenth century Florence to a means of instruction for twenty-first century Europeans. The book presents a series of short stories about various forms of ‘ordinary’ lives in today’s Europe: from the dock-worker in Rotterdam to the Romanian lorry-driver, from the turbulent journey of an Ivorian migrant to the Afghan fruit-picker on a Greek island, from the gay asylum seeker in Berlin to the elderly musician struggling with domestic violence in Tbilisi. Based on a close reading of these stories, our seminar started a conversation about the concept of the everyday, the nature and limits of the representation of the everyday in Judah’s book, and about how life is experienced in Europe today, given the institutions and laws of Europe.

This collection collects some of the short essays produced in the framework of this seminar. Their topics are as varied as the stories contained in the book. Each of these essays is marked by an extreme attention to the details of the stories, critically reflects on its own methodology and offers thoughts on the feasibility and function of a law of the everyday. As a whole, they punctuate a path of reflection that, we believe, has the potential to form a new approach to European law, in parallel and in dialogue with approaches that are currently emerging, such as critical approaches to EU law, law and geography, and the contribution of law and political economy perspectives. In this short introduction, we wish to do no more than mark some modest steps on this path.