Conceptual analysis, legal pluralism, and EU law

My objective is to advance a general conclusion about the methodology of analytical legal theory, that conceptual analysis, still a popular method in the philosophy of law, can only ever form the beginning and never the end of a theoretical explanation of the nature of law. The strategy I propose to adopt is focused and limited in the following way: I aim to support this general conclusion by assessing a particular and prevalent conceptual explanation of European Union (EU) law. This is the legal pluralist view which supposes that the ultimate source of validity of EU laws is relative to the particular legal systems of the EU (namely, the legal systems of the Member States and the legal system of the EU itself). I argue that this view fails on philosophical grounds, but more importantly, its failure yields important lessons for the methodology of analytical legal theory.