ABSTRACT
Euro-lawyers can appear as an enigma to anyone studying the EU polity. While European studies have given law a critical role not only as the engine of the integration process but also as the principal source of legitimacy of the EU itself, we actually know very little about the people whose task it is to control and develop European law. The invitation issued more than twenty years ago by prominent scholars from the field of European studies to analyse the ‘community of EC lawyers’1 (that is, those who ‘create’ everyday law, such as the judges at the Court of Justice, law professors, business lawyers, barristers or the legal advisors to the EC institutions, and so on) has hardly been accepted.2 In comparison with other professionals whose role in the European construction is widely known (such as national and EU civil servants, journalists, lobbyists or unionists3), Eurolawyers remain a sort of terra incognita.4 While jurists appear in some respects to be omnipresent in the European construction – their contributions are noticeable
everywhere – they are at the same time almost invisible, as the ‘social ensemble’ they constitute fails to exist as an organized and unified group or profession. Decades of mobilizations in building a dense network of transnational legal associations like the Fédération internationale pour le droit européen (FIDE), professional bodies such as the Conseil consultative des barreaux de l’Europe, and specialized law journals or research institutes such as the Académie de droit européen de Trèves have not succeeded in building a common understanding of what a Euro-lawyer is – or should be.5
