Viking, Laval and Beyond is the first book of a new series that seeks to explore European Union (EU) membership through “landmark” European Court of Justice cases and secondary legislation. As is described in the book's introductory chapter (at p. 3), cases and legislation are selected for examination by reference to two criteria: first, that the case or legislation is thought to be of particular significance and controversy in a specific regulatory domain of EU law and, second, that the case or legislation has caused particular upheaval or controversy in the domestic systems of at least some EU Member States. These selection parameters reflect the two central aims of the series. These are to analyse the operation of EU law from a Member State rather than central perspective, and to bring to bear in tandem specialist and generalist EU perspectives. The series editors hope that their approach will break down the scholarly compartmentalisation, which they rightly observe to be a feature of most foregoing EU law scholarship. Furthermore, by focusing upon EU law in the Member States, they hope to capture more of the diffuse interactions, impacts, and “accommodations” of EU law in the Member States. They wish to present a more complex account of EU Member State relations than hitherto, by shining a light on non-implementation and the diverse judicial and administrative means through which EU law is absorbed into national discourse and practice. This is perhaps the most provocative aspect of this series' positioning, since it starts from a theoretical premise that is at odds with the dominant account of EU law supremacy – that of straightforward obedience and subordination of Member States, and uniform, deep penetration of EU law. This theoretical (and consequent methodological) “radicalism” should, in my view, be warmly welcomed as an important signal and driver of the discipline's maturity and intellectual development.

It will be apparent to anyone with even a fleeting interest in EU law why the editors concluded that the Viking and Laval cases readily meet the two “landmark” selection criteria as suitable objects of inquiry for the series. Since the joined cases were decided in 2008, there has been a plethora of commentary about them and, in particular, the deeply controversial “balance” that was struck in the cases between economic and social rights. Consistently with the series' aims, Viking, Laval and Beyond goes beyond specialist discussion of these seminal cases from an EU labour law perspective, and engages with the cases from internal market and fundamental rights perspectives. The book is structured in three parts: Part 1 analyses the cases from a macro-EU-level perspective, Part 2 from the perspectives of nine EU or European Economic Area (EEA) Member State perspectives (Austria, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway, Poland, Sweden and the UK), and Part 3 horizontally across various “spectra” to explore the implications of EU law in the Member States.

The first three chapters of the first part of the book (Chapters 2–4) provide thoughtful accounts of the “justifiability” of the Viking and Laval cases from an internal (market) perspective (Weatherill) and an external (International Labour Organisation European Convention on Human Rights) perspective (Bogg and Velyvyte). Weatherill argues that the Viking and Laval cases are a “corruption” of the Court of Justice's “otherwise good” record of striking a balance between economic and social rights. He argues (at p. 35) that the decisions were “barren of adequate nuance and miss out the wide margin of discretion properly accorded to [Member States]”. For Weatherill, then, the “problem” in Viking and Laval is the court: internal market law, he argues, does not generally carry an “illegitimate deregulatory force” (p. 39). Bogg takes up Weatherill's argument as part of his chapter, which critiques Viking and Laval from an International Labour Organisation perspective. Bogg rejects Weatherill's “refined balancing” solution in favour of a more radical Albany-style immunity, which underlines the autonomy of labour law. Although Velyvyte's chapter was written before the Court of Justice delivered its (controversial) Opinion 2/13 on the legality of EU accession to the European Convention on Human Rights, the chapter foreshadows many of the arguments articulated in the Opinion, particularly in respect of the autonomy of EU law and its justiciability. Together, these three chapters set the scene for the Member States that form the next part of the book, as well as delivering useful analytical contributions in their own right.

The final chapter of the first part of the book (Chapter 5) is somewhat different to the first three. It is written by “the adoptive parents” of the Monti II Regulation and offers a perspective that mirrors the Member State chapters in charting the Commission's ultimately doomed legislative proposal for a Regulation, which it had hoped would ameliorate the worst social effects of the Viking and Laval decisions. The chapter highlights the complex political landscape that underpins subsidiarity and the nuanced relationships that exist between the EU's law-making institutions. Although, as the authors of the chapter acknowledge, the Monti II proposal received much criticism from academics, policy makers, and trade unions alike, the authors succeed in providing a persuasive account of the Regulation's unfulfilled potential.

The second part of the book is a collection of Member State perspectives on the Viking and Laval decisions. Most admirable perhaps in this part of the book is the collection's method of comparative analysis. Rather than mere description of different impacts and responses to Viking and Laval, the book takes a comparative law approach that has a forceful analytical purpose. To use Bobek's language (at p. 337), comparative analysis can have a “chameleonic role”. It can be used as a “tool of contestation”, “divergence”, and “national mutual affirmation”. The authors of Viking, Laval and Beyond, in my view, used a comparative method that made fullest use of its “chameleonic” potential. This potential was realised in no small part by Prassl's “three dimensions of heterogeneity” (“systemic”, “conceptual”, and “procedural or remedial”) (in Chapter 6). I found this framework especially helpful in providing common “terms of reference” with which to reflect upon and synthesise the comparative insights throughout Part 2 of the collection.

At its most provocative, this collection conveys some very challenging messages about the nature, ideology, and impact of EU law. One of the most striking messages from the collection for me was that there is a risk (or perhaps empirical reality) that there may be a Luxembourg law-making “bubble”: a court that is a declaratory law-making “machine” that exists for its own sake and that does not really change behaviour. The doctrine of EU law supremacy might be mere “veneer” where the law that the EU produces is not recognised as legitimate by those who it governs. As the editors acknowledge, given the nature of the Viking and Laval cases as “landmarks”, there are open questions about the extent to which the cases, and the wider and deeper insights that they reveal, can be said to be representative or endurable. Perhaps then the “truth” about what these cases can tell us is somewhat less radical than emerges from the contributions to this collection. But that should not, in my view, cause us to engage any less seriously with some of the more provocative questions that these cases raise. This collection's innovative “socio-legal” focus upon the Member States sheds light upon gaps and contestations between “law in the books” and “law in practice”. The academic EU law community might now, perhaps, take this one step further to look beneath the level of state actors to capture the “lived experience” of EU law among lower-level institutions and social actors, through empirical methods. This would enrich the theoretical and methodological EU law landscape and our understandings of the functions, roles, and impacts of (EU) law.