A word from Marc Blanquet, Director of the European Centre of Excellence at Capitole

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"According to the beautiful motto of the European Union, it is "united in diversity"... It is on this model that a group of academics from Toulouse, over the years, have confronted their visions of European construction, some interested in integration and the "community model", others passionate about comparative approaches and cooperation between national systems that remain distinct.

The conviction that emerged from their work was that the European Union, in their image, brought together different approaches, different methods, with a palette ranging from integration to coordination through harmonization or cooperation... And it is this vision that inspired the proposal in 2012, to set up a Jean Monnet Center of Excellence in Toulouse, this coherence and complementarities being declined on two fields, that of research with the work of the IRDEIC (Institute of Research in European, International and Comparative Law), and that of training, with the IED (European Institute of Law). The transformation of the latter into a European Law School is both a culmination, the first years of operation of the IED having made a trump card of the international development of the University, but also a new departure, the School carrying within it a new forceful idea, according to which the training of lawyers in Europe and for Europe must be made by taking into consideration this originality, this specificity of a European legal space combining common law and national laws, but also by nourishing this training with all the historical doctrinal wealth of this "old continent" .
 
Through these evolutions, structuring, it is always a certain idea, a conception, a conviction that we have tried to translate, illustrate, cultivate, both through research and training, the project being therefore eminently and excellently academic...".