European Social Science History Conference

Karin van Leuween and Brigitte Leucht participates in the 2014 European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC) in Amsterdam on April 23-26. 

Karin van Leuween has co-organized the session "Experts in Politics: Transformation, Transition and Discursive Shifts in 20th Century European Governance Structures". Karin will present a paper and a talk on Lawyers as Experts? Changing Practices of Expertise in the Early Dutch reception of European law while Brigitte has written a paper and a presentation titled Inno Revisited: Experts, Expertise and the Reach of EU Competition Law in the 1970s.

For the full program of the conference click here.

Abstract of Karin van Leuween - "Lawyers as Experts? Changing Practices of Expertise in the Early Dutch reception of European law":

Providing authoritive knowledge on ‘good’ legislation and rulemaking, legal expertise has been fundamental in policymaking already from the 19th century onwards. Typically however, the role of the lawyer in this ‘bureaucratic’ context was considered highly instrumental to political decision-making. Over the 20th century, in many European countries new practices of expertise were added to the lawyer’s repertoire with the opening of new possibilities for litigation.
This paper explores the changing role of legal experts in the 20th century by analysing the early Dutch reception of European law. Responding to activist lawyers who filed various test cases on the new EEC treaty (1957), Dutch courts provided some of the crucial cases for the ‘legal revolution’ of the European Court of Justice in the early 1960s and thus played an important role in the development of the core doctrines in European law. With these doctrines, the role of legal experts in European law got highly politicized, giving ground to famous histories of ‘judicial politics’. Drawing on original research in archives, court reports and legal literature, this paper however argues that the case of European law should be understood from a more long term perspective. In particular, the opening up of more possibilities for litigation in the fields of international and administrative law is taken into account, since this development had already changed the practices of expertise of many lawyers involved in the European law debate. 

Abstract of Brigitte Leucht - "Inno Revisited: Experts, Expertise and the Reach of EU Competition Law in the 1970s"

This paper proposes to explore the role of experts and expertise in shaping the competition policy and law of the European Union – one of the most successful examples of supranational governance in action.
Competition policy and law have been influenced by different types of expertise (economics and law); different practices of expertise (often behind the scenes in the case of policymaking and more openly through litigation); and different types of experts (including academic experts, policymakers, lawyers, business actors and national administrators).
This paper will use one specific case – the “Inno-case” (C-13-77), inspired by a question from a Belgian court – to analyze the interaction and/or competition between different types of expertise and experts in extending the scope of European competition law vis-à-vis member states. The European Court of Justice adopted the idea that the competition rules of the Treaty of Rome, which were designed to apply to private actors, can also be applied to member states whenever a state regulation requires, favours or reinforces private behaviour contrary to those rules.
Based on original archival research and the evaluation of contemporary scholarly publications, this paper will address the role of experts and expertise in the development and implementation of the Inno-case both on the European level and in selected member states (the United Kingdom, France and Germany).
This in-depth analysis will provide insight into the role of experts and expertise during a period when European economies and businesses faced a variety of economic challenges in the aftermath of the oil crisis of 1973.