Experts increasingly play a more central role at all levels of public governance. As holders of expert knowledge, they are considered trustworthy providers of certainty and answers in the face of increased complexity, interdependence and the fast-changing pace of life. The authoritative certainty to which they lay claim causes them to be frequently called upon and consulted by policy-makers. Their importance has increased as policy-making has become more complex and intense.

This chapter focuses on how the European integration process affects the role and function of the legal profession. The chapter starts from a number of observations on transformations in the legal profession, from the growth of the legal profession to the increasing tension between local and national lawyers versus those working in European and global settings. The overall development culminates in the European expert rhetoric, which is driven and promoted by the European Commission. Experts are expected to fill spaces in the endless numbers of European committees, and the whole inner machinery of the EU is dependent on self-named and EU certified experts. What then is a European legal expert? How does a legal expert differ from other experts? This chapter uses the professionalisation theory by Oevermann to test whether and to what extent legal professionalism is replaced by a legal expertise rhetoric and what it could mean for legal professionalism and the European legal profession.

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.

The essay discusses the character of transnational legal expertise as a practice of making and unmaking of conceptual distinctions and moving between principles that reflect different institutionally embedded legal projects. At the same time, lawyers are trained also to carry out rhetorical performances that create the impression that these countervailing legalities may be stabilized through techniques of balancing. As a consequence, the transnational legal space appears both as a field of struggle and professional solidarity. Even as lawyers regard this as nothing other than a natural feature of the casuistry of the law itself, it alienates lay audiences that have drawn from lawyers’ constant disagreement the conclusion that legal expertise is just a species of elite opinion.