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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

By
Päivi Leino-Sandberg
Edited by
Emilia Korkea-aho  and
Päivi Leino-Sandberg
Emilia Korkea-aho
Affiliation:
University of Eastern Finland
Päivi Leino-Sandberg
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
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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.

Keywords

European ParliamentlawEU institutionslegal expertise, European Union
Type
Chapter
Information
Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making , pp. 95 - 123
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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