6 - Hot Spots and Cold Spots: Euro-Lawyering’s Uneven Corporatization

Summary

Chapter 6 traces the evolution and corporatization of Euro-lawyering. The repertoire of court-driven change developed by the first Euro-lawyers only took root where a broader array of practitioners came to perceive it as professionally advantageous. Since the 1980s, a rising network of "Euro-firms" took charge of Euro-lawyering to tend to a corporate, transnational clientele in global cities. Conversely, in more resource-scarce client markets where lawyers are balkanized into generalists, practitioners perceive mobilizing European law as impractical - something one does elsewhere. Since the only national courts routinely solicited to apply EU law and solicit the ECJ are in cities where Euro-firms cluster, the judicial construction of Europe has evolved as patch-worked ecology hollowed by black holes. The chapter leverages geospatial analysis and comparative fieldwork across five cities where Euro-lawyering corporatized– Rome, Milan, Paris, Hamburg and Munich – and four cities where it never took root – Palermo, Naples, Bari, and Marseille. Readers curious about how lawyers rework economic and spatial inequities into place-based identities, how these identities refract access to courts and the promise of judicial policymaking, and how repertoires of legal mobilization are co-opted and corporatized will find this chapter of interest.