Pavone, Tommaso. The Ghostwriters: Lawyers and the Politics behind the Judicial Construction of Europe. Cambridge Studies in Law and Society. Cambridge University Press, November 2022. Paperback. ISBN: 9781009074988.
The Ghostwriters challenges the traditional, judge-centered narrative that portrays the European Union as a polity built primarily by judicial activism. Pavone uncovers the political work of practicing lawyers—“Euro-lawyers”—who engineered the expansion of European law from the ground up. Through extensive interviews, archival research, media sources, and geospatial evidence, the book shows how lawyers recruited clients willing to break domestic laws, persuaded resistant national judges to apply European rules, and even ghostwrote referrals to the European Court of Justice. By mobilizing courts against their own governments, these lawyers overcame entrenched national resistance and played a decisive role in constructing Europe’s supranational legal order.
The book advances a revisionist, bottom-up account of European integration, illuminating how political struggles among lawyers and judges shaped the emergence of the EU’s legal system. Pavone’s narrative provides accessible and compelling stories of the individuals who transformed European governance, demonstrating that the politics of lawyers—not just judicial entrepreneurship—were central to the making of today’s Europe.