Book contents
- Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making
- Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making: Introduction
- Part I Theorising Legal Expertise
- Part II In-House Legal Expertise
- 6 WANTED: A Creative Lawyer with Great Technical Skills for Demanding Work in the European Parliament
- 7 The Politics of Legal Expertise at Westminster in Times of Crisis
- 8 International Bureaucracies: Extraterritorial Reach of the European Commission’s Legal Expertise
- 9 The Negotiating Capital of Trade Experts: Transparency in EU-Asian Free Trade Agreements
- Part III External Legal Expertise
- Index
6 - WANTED: A Creative Lawyer with Great Technical Skills for Demanding Work in the European Parliament
from Part II - In-House Legal Expertise
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 October 2022
- Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making
- Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making: Introduction
- Part I Theorising Legal Expertise
- Part II In-House Legal Expertise
- 6 WANTED: A Creative Lawyer with Great Technical Skills for Demanding Work in the European Parliament
- 7 The Politics of Legal Expertise at Westminster in Times of Crisis
- 8 International Bureaucracies: Extraterritorial Reach of the European Commission’s Legal Expertise
- 9 The Negotiating Capital of Trade Experts: Transparency in EU-Asian Free Trade Agreements
- Part III External Legal Expertise
- Index
Summary
In EU policy-making, questions concerning legal limits and EU competence are routinely treated as a domain reserved for lawyers, as if they were indeed objective in nature, and as such somehow separate from policy-making. Yet such legal advice is often decisive in settling the scope or intensity of EU legislative intervention. The European Parliament is a free market of legal advice where law seldom counts as absolute truth and legal determinations are formally allocated to a political body, the Legal Affairs Committee. Building on over 50 interviews with legal advisers and policy makers (including in particular MEPs), this chapter provides an empirical study of what legal advisors in the European Parliament do and what remains of their power in a policy-making environment where only compromises count, and the main function of the lawyer is to assist in identifying the compromise. Their main institutional agenda is geared at defending the clients’ interest: the prerogatives of the Parliament as an institution. Yet objectivity is vital when navigating among the agendas of eight political groups from 28 Member States and hundreds of political parties.
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- Information
- Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making , pp. 95 - 123Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022