This chapter gives an overview of EU policy-making, outlining what types of policy the EU makes, in which areas it is important and in which areas it plays a smaller role, and how the EU’s policy-making role has evolved over the past decades. In doing so, it sketches the broader picture within which the subsequent chapters on agenda-setting, decision-making and implementation of EU policies can be placed. The text seeks to give students a firm grasp of the broader patterns of EU policy-making, while providing examples of specific policies in order to make more tangible what EU policies look like. After outlining the varying involvement of the EU in different policy areas, the chapter provides an overview of both the expenditure and the revenue side of EU budgetary policies. This is followed by a discussion of EU regulatory policies, both in relation to the internal market and beyond. After this general introduction, the chapter zooms in on the development of two policy areas in which EU policy-making has shown important developments over the past decades: Economic and Monetary Union and foreign policy.

The EU exercises significant influence over global regulatory standards, whether as a result of its ability to unilaterally export its rules to foreign markets via market mechanisms–a phenomenon that I have elsewhere described as ‘the Brussels Effect’–or by entrenching them globally through bilateral or multilateral negotiations. In all cases, the legal expertise of the Commission is central. It either pro-actively supplies its expertise to their foreign counterparts or responds to the demand to offer technical expertise to create a rule-based order that closely imitates the regulatory state in Europe. Companies also resort to the Commission as their preferred forum, relying on the legal expertise residing in Europe to resolve disputes originating far outside the borders of the EU. This contribution discusses the channels through which the EU’s legal expertise migrates to foreign markets, the political forces behind this migration, as well as the economic, political, and legal implications that the extraterritorial reach of EU’s legal expertise has. It shows how current crises both in the EU internal and external dimension have opened up new spaces for legal expertise to operate.

The chapter scrutinises the formation of a new type of legal expertise at the crossing between public and private law in France. It provides a sociological mapping of the blurring of ‘private-public’ divide through the rise of Parisian law firms and their historical repositioning in the French field of power as key brokers and a central crossroad in-between State and market actors. Through an in-depth analysis of more than two hundred individual career paths of leading politicians and high civil servants that have circulated from the various branches of the public sector (government offices, parliamentary committees, regulatory agencies, courts, etc.) to large corporate law firms (the so-called pantouflage), it offers a sociological assessment of the unprecedented blurring of the ‘public-private’ divide that has been taking place over the past two decades.

When we were discussing the idea of an edited volume on legal experts and legal expertise for the first time, our aim was to a large extent descriptive, to lay before the reader many types of legal experts that have so far remained invisible. But our idea for the conclusion was slightly different. We hoped to be able to draw together multiple lines of investigation and to create a typology of legal experts. The envisioned typology would group legal experts working in the most varied kinds of regulatory, policy-making and operative tasks in the EU policy-making context on the basis of some recognisable and common traits that all legal experts share.