Where have all the lawyers gone? Structure and transformations of the top European Commission officials' legal training
Founded on a prosopographical analysis of the European Commission¹s top civil servants, this paper gathers data in order to contribute to the analysis of the European legal capital in two ways. First, we show that while jurists (i.e. agents for whom law was the main element of their training) integrated the European Commission administration very early on, and acquired dominant positions, they were strong only insofar as their legal training was the basis of a broader undertaking of construction and acquisition of a more general bureaucratic capital. Secondly, we demonstrate that this ability to hold dominant positions within the machine tends to be increasingly contested with the rise of other agents, especially economists, whose properties tend to become indispensable for a high level career within the European Commission.
Building Europe on a Weak Field: Law, Economics, and Scholarly Avatars in Transnational Politics1
The present article mobilizes the concepts of “weak field” and “avatar” to explain Europe’s historically variable meanings, analyzing two successful reinventions (as a “community of law” and a “single market”) and one failure (“social Europe”). Focusing on law and economics, the authors first show that the weak field of EU studies serves as a crossroads between nationally anchored scholarly professions and Europe’s political field; second, they show that under certain conditions legal and economic constructions have exerted performative effects via scholarly avatars. Depending on their strategic positioning, scholarly avatars facilitate symbolic exchange across political, technocratic, and scholarly boundaries and endow theoretical constructions with performative potential.
Le droit de la République (1870-1914) : légitimation(s) de l'État et construction du rôle de professeur de droit constitutionnel au début du siècle
Au debut de la IIIe Republique, la position sociale qu'occupent les professeurs de droit constitutionnel- a la fois dans leur champ social d'origine mais egalement par rapport aux groupes sociaux demandeurs determine les usages sociaux et, par consequent, le contenu et la forme des univers symboliques qu' ils produisent ainsi que leur impact sur le. Systeme institutionnel. Analysant la redefinition de la profession autour d'un role hybride, davantage tourne vers la production scientifique que le role traditionnel, elle indique comment ces professeurs rencontrent le projet de l'administration republicaine, qui selectionne a la faculte parisienne ceux des professeurs les plus enclins a privilegier la science, qui adherent egalement aux options politiques republicaines. A Paris, emerge ainsi un groupe de legistes republicains tandis qu'en province, des professeurs delaisses par le pouvoir tentent de construire des modeles alternatifs autour de la cause fonctionnariste.