ABSTRACT

The role of lawyers as intermediaries between European Community institutions and the private sector, as well as the lawyers’ resulting influence on European integration processes, has as yet not found much scholarly attention in the field of integration history. This chapter addresses this research gap by analysing how European competition lawyers could assert their own involvement – first informally, and gradually through formalised procedures – in competition cases between the European Commission and private companies from the 1970s onwards. The analysis shows that, whereas lawyers were no key players in competition policy over the first decade after the Communities’ creation, they pushed for a reform of the procedure of competition cases from the early 1970s, especially regarding investigations and hearings conducted by the Commission. Through their informal activism, competition lawyers became essential intermediaries in the interactions between companies and the Commission. European competition policy implementation procedures may seem, at first sight, a technical matter, with limited political implications. Yet, the analysis of the coming into being of these procedures provides new insights into which actors were able to interact with the European institutions in the 1960s to 1980s, based on what expertise, and according to what formal or informal rules.