This book addresses the impact of EU law beyond its own borders, the use of law as a powerful instrument of EU external action, and some of the normative challenges this poses. The phenomenon of EU law operating beyond its borders, which may be termed its 'global reach', includes the extraterritorial application of EU law, territorial extension, and the so-called 'Brussels Effect' resulting from unilateral legislative and regulatory action, but also includes the
impact of the EU's bilateral relationships, and its engagement with multilateral fora and the negotiation of international legal instruments.
The book maps this phenomenon across a range of policy fields, including the environment, the internet and data protection, banking and financial markets, competition policy, and migration. It argues that in looking beyond the undoubtedly important instrumental function of law we can start to identify the ways in which law shapes the EU's external identity and its relations with other legal regimes, both enabling and constraining the EU's external action.

Marise Cremona is Professor Emeritus at the European University Institute, Florence. She was Professor of European Law, and a co-Director of the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute 2006-2017. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Common Market Law Review. Her research interests are in the external relations law of the European Union, in particular the constitutional basis for EU external relations law and the legal and institutional dimensions of EU foreign policy.
Joanne Scott is Professor of European Law at the European University Institute and Co-Director of the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute. She is currently on leave from University College London, Faculty of Laws, where she taught from 2005 to 2017. Her research interests lie in the areas of environmental law and climate change law, EU extraterritoriality, new modes of EU governance and the relationships between different legal orders. Professor Scott was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2013 and as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2012.