Kjaer, Poul F. --- "Claim-making and parallel universes: legal pluralism from Church and empire to statehood and the European Union" [2018] ELECD 384; in Davies, Gareth; Avbelj, Matej (eds), "Research Handbook on Legal Pluralism and EU Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018) 11

Book Title: Research Handbook on Legal Pluralism and EU Law

Editor(s): Davies, Gareth; Avbelj, Matej

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN: 9781786433084

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: Claim-making and parallel universes: legal pluralism from Church and empire to statehood and the European Union

Author(s): Kjaer, Poul F.

Number of pages: 11

Abstract/Description:

Legal pluralism was traditionally regarded as a ‘non-modern’ and ‘non-European’ phenomenon. It was only in the wake of the deepening of European integration from the Single Market and Economic and Monetary Union onwards that legal pluralism came to be considered a central feature of Europe. This chapter, however, argues that legal pluralism always has been an essential characteristic of modern Europe and of modern European law. That has been the case from the eleventh and twelfth-century Investiture Conflict between Church and Emperor over the overlapping claims of the emerging modern states and various empires until 1918 to the contemporary duality between the EU legal order and Member State legal orders. In other words: overlapping jurisdictions, acting as parallel universes, and mutually exclusive contrafactual claims to supremacy have always been central elements of modern European law.