Tradition and criticism in integration law legal scholarship

Abstract

Integration law legal knowledge can be divided in two branches – a traditional scholarship and a critical one. Traditional legal scholarship is represented by usual legal doctrine and is characterized by evolutionists and economic axioms. This scholarship measures all integration processes having the European integration as the sole benchmark – lacking, for this reason, analytical concepts to understand institutional solutions within each integration experience. Critical scholarship refuses the evolutionist standpoint and, aware of the limits of a strict economic interpretation of integration processes, aims to establish the foundations of a new Research Agenda on Integration Law and to influence contemporary debate on Latin-American integration experiences.