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Sociologies of law and science are increasingly intertwined, offering an important analytic platform from which the join workings of legal and scientific processes can be apprehended and interrogated. This chapter attends to scholarship that has brought together the critical assessment of legal and scientific endeavours, and illustrates how it enabled the breaking of new ground. In particular, the chapter illuminates how new conceptual and methodological engagements have made apparent some of the political dynamics that determine how law functions in societies, and how scientific and legal practices can feed off each other in strengthening pre-existing relationships of institutional power. If the sociology of science has to a great extent enabled legal scholars to approach science as a much less uncertain object than they may have done otherwise, scholarship in law and science has also contributed to destabilizing understandings of the ontology of law - adding new insights into the many ways in which legal authority gets constructed, sustained or defined.

From an EU perspective, the CRPD is a so-called mixed agreement. This means that it is an international agreement that is concluded both by the EU and its individual Member States. This raises important legal questions, since it implies that for part of the agreement, the EU exercises its competences whereas, for the other part(s), the Member States have retained and exercised competences. The mixed nature of an agreement has several repercussions in relation to the negotiation and ratification of the agreement, as well as for the question of the international responsibility of the EU and the Member States. In addition, the ‘mixity’ raises the question as to which specific EU obligations are incumbent on the Member States in relation to the agreement. The present chapter discusses these issues by focusing specifically on the CRPD as a mixed multilateral agreement.