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.
Government lawyers and the training of senior civil servants. Maintaining law at the heart of the French state
To assess the influence of law and jurists in the conduct of contemporary French state, this article examines the role of the Council of State at ENA (École Nationale d'Administration), the main school for top civil servants. Although the study reveals the decreasing part of law in the bureaucratic capital over the past fifty years, it also shows how government lawyers have resisted this downsizing process. The teaching of a subject called ‘legistics’ provides top officials with a different view of law. Dedicated to promoting the political utility of law, legistics complies with managerial values while it sticks to the Weberian model of bureaucracy. As a result of the introduction of legistics, new techniques of legal drafting have been spreading within French public administration. Legistics thus plays a role in the contemporary reshaping of public legal practices, as well as in the renewing of legal legitimacy in the reform of public affairs.
The Organization of American States
On January 13, 1958, a special committee which had been created to draw up the general policy to be followed in carrying out a proposed fellowship program of the Organization of American States (OAS), in addition to the regular fellowships already offered by the organization and the individual governments, presented a report and draft resolution to the Council for consideration. In accordance with the temporary provision of a resolution on the general policy for the fellowship program approved by the Council of OAS on January 15, Secretary-General Mora prepared the regulations for the award and administration of the fellowships and presented them to the Council at a meeting held on June 4, 1958. At that time it was agreed that the representatives on the Council would forward the regulations to their governments and that they would also be transmitted to the Committee on the Fellowship Program for its information. The regulations stated that the Secretary-General of OAS should be assisted in the administration of the program by the Executive Director of Technical Cooperation, the Technical Secretary, and an Advisory Board. According to the regulations, an OAS fellowship was one to be granted by the organization, after consideration of the applicant's study plans, to a person with advanced training in the branch of knowledge in which he had specialized, so that he might have an opportunity to study abroad. The regulations included sections on the selection of candidates and the processing of applications, and forfeiture, renunciation, and cancellation of fellowships.