How does European law know what a forest is? More broadly, how does it know the world it governs? I took up these questions in my inaugural lecture as Professor of European Law in the Humanities at the University of Amsterdam, a chair in the interdisciplinary programme of European Studies, where we study Europe through its history, culture, politics, economics and law.

Law’s epistemic power

Laws prescribe how the world ought to be. As the legal scholar Christoph Möllers puts it, legal norms imagine a world different from this one. This normative power makes law crucial for democracy: it allows a society to express how it wants to live. But before law can prescribe, it must decide what the world is. I call this the epistemic power of law: the power to construct and organise knowledge about the world, and so to shape what seems possible. It is a quieter power, and it matters especially for a Union whose democratic authority is less direct than that of its Member States and which has long relied on technocratic governance. EU law’s decisions often look technical, but they settle what the world is, whose knowledge counts and who lives with the consequences.

This power works in three ways. Law closes questions that are not in fact settled, producing certainty. Its closures then appear as descriptions rather than choices, which is what makes them hard to argue with. And law does not abolish the uncertainty it has settled; it relocates it, redistributing the burden of carrying it. In a democracy, therefore, law’s constructions of the world must be visible and open to contestation.

Scholarship on the EU regulatory state is often preoccupied with questions of accountability, delegation and expertise. It addresses the tension between technocracy and democracy, but frames it as elections against technocrats, and so locates the democratic question at the moment of institutional decision. Who decides? Are they democratically elected? I argue that the democratic question arises already in the epistemic choices behind regulation, and that those choices are settled in and through law. The EU regulatory state is not only an institutional order; it is also an epistemic one. And because European regulation now reaches well beyond Europe, so does its epistemic power: as its rules travel, so do its categories and definitions. The equally important questions become: whose knowledge counts? And can it be contested?

In the weeds

Some years ago I advised a member of the European Parliament on a committee examining how the EU decides whether a pesticide is safe. The trigger was glyphosate, the most widely used weedkiller in the world. In 2015 the World Health Organization’s cancer agency concluded that it is probably carcinogenic to humans; the European Food Safety Authority said it is unlikely to cause cancer. I sat through the hearings, and it was not possible to work out who was right. It turned out that the two sides had followed different legal rules. EU law told EFSA to assess glyphosate on its own, yet nobody sprays pure glyphosate, and almost all studies of people exposed in real life are studies of the product in the bottle. EU law also puts the burden of proving safety on the companies seeking approval, so EFSA relied on confidential industry studies while the international agency relied on published ones. The disagreement was scientific; the choices behind it were legal. Scholars of science and technology call this co-production: law and science shape each other, and together produce the world law governs.

In the woods

Now from the weeds into the woods, and back to the EUDR. How is that proof of our deforestation-free chocolate and coffee to be produced?

A forest looks different depending on where you stand: among the trees, the animals and the people who live there, or from high above, through a satellite. The European legislature chose the view from above. It defined a forest by three numbers a satellite can measure – canopy cover, tree height, area – and combined that with a date: the thirty-first of December 2020. It answered a different question. Not: what is a forest? But: what can we measure from space, on a particular day?

Teaching law inside a humanities faculty has taught me to ask, alongside the lawyer’s question of whether something is lawful: how is it for those who are subject to the law?

Reinerio Zepeda has grown arabica coffee in the shade near Minas de Oro in central Honduras for most of his life. He told the news outlet Mongabay that he had heard on television about Europe worrying over deforestation, but that nobody had come to his farm to explain. He has not cut trees, he said; anybody can come and check. But somebody must now produce evidence for his plot: GPS coordinates, proof of his right to use the land, satellite images showing no forest there in December 2020. Not everyone holds a title; ownership is sometimes collective, agreements often verbal. Satellite maps get it wrong, because they don’t see what happens on the ground and correcting them means someone going to check. This is called ground-truthing. But nothing in the regulation obliges the buyer to do it or to bear the costs.

So the law has not produced certainty; it has decided where uncertainty will sit. At the European border, once found compliant, the product becomes deforestation-free as a matter of law. Behind that point there is doubt. Zepeda, who has never cut a tree, may lose his buyer, because it is cheaper to buy elsewhere than to go to his finca and check.

And unlike in the glyphosate case, the people affected cannot sign a citizens’ initiative or petition the European Parliament. Zepeda is not a European citizen. He has no vote, and the law does not even speak to him. Yet farmers’ organisations, indigenous groups and civil society in producing countries support this law. What they ask is that their knowledge counts.

Democratic contestability

Law closes questions down, but it can also open them up. More than a million citizens signed a European Citizens’ Initiative to ban glyphosate, and the Parliament investigated. The pressure revealed blind spots: European pesticide rules did not simply organise knowledge about risk; they also produced ignorance. Some of those gaps have since begun to close. In Brazil, NGOs and researchers are building an observatory of rights, a public map of land conflicts that provides information to European buyers. In doing so they are building a rival infrastructure of knowing under the EUDR. Once law’s choices are revealed as choices, they belong in democratic debate.

Why this matters now

Since the European elections of 2024, the Union has begun to take apart a good deal of what it built in the decade before, under the label of simplification and competitiveness. Simplification is a word no one can be against, which is exactly what makes it useful. Underneath it are political decisions about who is protected and who bears responsibility for harm, which appear as technical maintenance of the internal market. What is being removed is not only protection, but the right to know: for example, many pesticides would be approved indefinitely, with no obligation to reassess them. This is the part that worries me most. Contestation can reveal shortcomings that law can correct. What is proposed now would mean the law stops asking questions altogether.

Why this chair sits in the Humanities

Law’s epistemic power cannot be seen from inside legal doctrine alone. Historians remind us of the contingency of the laws we have and of their social roots, which is how a closure – what is a forest, what is a safe pesticide – becomes visible as a choice again. Culture scholars understand the art of construction and the power of discourse, which is how law’s descriptions are recognised as constructions. Political scientists and anthropologists study how laws work on the ground, which is the only way to see where the cost of uncertainty lands.

Europe’s categories are made in many places, in markets, in EU institutions, in public discourse, but law is where they are fixed, dated and made binding, and where European power reaches past Europe’s borders. That is why law belongs at the centre of European Studies.

Law cannot make the world certain. But European law can still be argued with. That is why citizens and social movements are mobilising it all over Europe and sometimes far beyond. The work of this Chair will be to give them the tools, by studying how law knows, where it is blind, and where it remains contestable.

Maria Weimer delivered her inaugural lecture, “How European Law Knows the World: Epistemic Power and Democratic Contestation”, at the University of Amsterdam on 2 October 2026, with support from the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES).