EUROLAWFIELD · Where does European law draw its authority from? Putting the European legal field back in
FP6 — Marie Curie Actions (Human Resources and Mobility)
- Duration
- 2007-09-01 → 2009-08-31
- EU contribution
- €197,408
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- EIF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Final Activity Report Summary - EUROLAWFIELD (Where Does European Law Draw its Authority From ? Putting the European Legal Field back in)
The essential objective of this project was to re-open the debate on the role lawyers and law play in EU polity. While there is a general agreement on the critical role of EC law in the process of European political integration, paradoxically, jurists frequently appear in this literature as purely legal animals. By considering them from the sole angle of the purely legal objectives which lawyers themselves attach to their practice, research has so far failed in examining them as social players able to constitute - by their specific expertise, but also by the multiple positions and venues they hold in EU polity - one of the core elites of the European construction. Methodologically, this implies to avoid looking exclusively at the European Court of Justice. In different works, I have suggested to widen the focus to the whole set of legally-endowed actors who produce, manipulate, and interpret the law of Europe. This has allowed providing with a renewed understanding of the role lawyers play. The main result of this study is to point at the brokering role lawyers play in EC polity from the very early years onwards. Positioned at the crossroads of a variety of economic, political and bureaucratic undertakings, easily circulating in-between the sectorial and national borders that make up Europe, EC lawyers form an elite of brokers.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
EUROLAWFIELD aims at providing a new conceptual framework to address empirically the following enigma: how can EU laws authority resist in a current context in which:- the Union is undergoing an unprecedented legitimacy crisis in which the central role of Law and other non-democratically elected EU actors is particularly criticized,- the cohesion of the EU-specialized legal community is jeopardized by its very success (enlargement of the EU, development of new EU legal domains and sub-fields)The issue is not only theoretically important but also politically relevant since it is widely acknowledged that the European Union has based much of his legitimacy on Law.The existing literature has essentially exemplified the role of social interests in the perennial importance of EU law but it has failed to analyze the very contribution of legal actors.Drawing a new set of concepts imported from the field of international relations studies as well as from the socio-legal one, this proposal intends to overcome this shortcoming.By putting the social and professional structure of the European Legal Field, EUROLAWFIELD intends to shed a new light on how EU laws authority is secured in a European political order that is still deprived of the conventional warrants of State sovereignty.The research strategy will follow two directions.First, it will build on extensive interviews with key Euro-law actors to map the functioning of the European Legal Field. By tracing the careers of particular individuals, it will reveal what sort of connections exists between the various arenas of European law practice.Second, by analyzing the mobilizations of EU lawyers, it will focus on their attempt to build a common professional identity of jurists in the frame of the European integration process.These two lines of research will help explain how European Laws authority is collectively built and maintained.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE · SAN DOMENICO DI FIESOLECoordinatorItaly
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union