Paper Titles & Abstracts

With interventions rendered almost as a matter of course in all cases before the ECJ, the assumption may be drawn that the Commission views the power to intervene as an important legal and political tool. However, compared with the other key interlocutors of the Court, such as Member State governments, and the Advocates General, little is known of the Commission's observations, or of their possible wider impacts. Quantitative work, notably by Stone Sweet has recently shown us the remarkably high degree of 'success' the Commission has in having the Court rule in line with its observations. Whilst the incidence and assumed impact of such interventions has been acknowledged in passing in many works on judicial politics in EU, usually referencing the early observations by Stein (1981), no sustained qualitative critique has been offered to date. Focusing on the role of the Commission Legal Service and its interactions with other arms of the Commission, the paper will explore the operation of Commission observations, and seek to offer a theoretical assessment of this relationship, drawing from existing models of EU governance.