Where have all the lawyers gone? Structure and transformations of the top European Commission officials’ legal training

Abstract

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.