Building a European Law Profession Between the State and the Market

This paper addresses a puzzle of EU polity building. While lawyers have been identified as key actors in State-building processes (Karpik & Halliday 1998), and despite the fact that the Common Market is famously a legal construct (Stone Sweet 2004, Shepel & Wesseling 1997), there is no such thing as an institutionalized European bar. How is it then that in such context the legal professions have remained so different and no strong EU-centered profession has emerged?

Looking back to the genesis of the E.E.C. and the negotiations of the first directive on the legal profession (1977), the paper will address this puzzle with a new theoretical toolbox and new archival material. It points at the proactive effects of the European Commission and more specifically the DG Internal Market, to include the legal profession into the Common Market policies. But the paper will also consider the opposition of national professional order (bars), who see any European intervention as a threat for the principle of self-regulation, as they try to trigger counter-mobilizations through their special links with Ministries of Justice (Abbott 1988)

The second part of this paper highlights the changes operating in the European political field since the 1980’s, building on the example of the 2004 directive regarding money laundering. Two factors have led to a redifinition of the relationship between lawyers and the european institutions : the “market” revolution (Jabko 2006) and the rise of business lawyers (Dezalay, Karpik 2010).