This chapter focuses on how the European integration process affects the role and function of the legal profession. The chapter starts from a number of observations on transformations in the legal profession, from the growth of the legal profession to the increasing tension between local and national lawyers versus those working in European and global settings. The overall development culminates in the European expert rhetoric, which is driven and promoted by the European Commission. Experts are expected to fill spaces in the endless numbers of European committees, and the whole inner machinery of the EU is dependent on self-named and EU certified experts. What then is a European legal expert? How does a legal expert differ from other experts? This chapter uses the professionalisation theory by Oevermann to test whether and to what extent legal professionalism is replaced by a legal expertise rhetoric and what it could mean for legal professionalism and the European legal profession.

Are tech giants responsible for their actions along Global Value Chains (GVC) down to the ‘Global South’? The responsibilities of private actors, companies evolving in the algorithmic society do not mean there is no responsibility for national states. Stressing private responsibilities below the surface of the constitution directs the attention to the bulk of national, European and international rules that are and that have been developed in the last decades and that in one way or the other are dealing with responsibility or perhaps even better responsibilities of private and public actors. From the discussions on ‘double standards’ to the recent Recommendation of the European Parliament, it is not only the behavior of companies but of their commercial partners along the GVC are at the heart of the debate. From the 1970s sector-specific or product-specific rules were adopted. Today, it is a holistic approach reflecting the globalization of supply chains that are needed. Recent initiatives on the due diligence of large companies seem to go in this direction. Many of the puzzling aspects are discussed in this chapter.

Technologies have always challenged, if not disrupted, the social, economic legal, and to an extent, the ideological status quo. Such transformations impact constitutional law, as the State formulates its legal response to the new technologies being developed and applied by the market, and as it considers its own use of the technologies. The development of data collection, mining, and algorithmic analysis, resulting in predictive profiling – with or without the subsequent potential manipulation of attitudes and behaviors of users – presents unique challenges to constitutional law at the doctrinal as well as theoretical levels.

Private law goes back to Roman law. Its codification in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave private law a public foundation. However, from the very moment of codification onwards, there was and there still is a tension between the civil codes and parliamentary legislative powers. Overall and until today, parliaments do not so easily interfere in national codifications. There is a certain reluctance throughout all countries with a codification and parliaments tend to rely first on the courts to find appropriate solutions for changing economic and political circumstances.

On 16 February 2017 the European Court of Justice had to decide the preliminary reference of Elisabeth Schmitt against TÜV Rheinland (Box 15.1). Thousands of women around the world were affected by substandard breast implants. The women brought actions to courts in France, Germany and elsewhere. E. Schmitt’s case is paradigmatic for how courts are struggling to apply tort law to this multifaceted constellation. This case serves as a starter for a discussion of the transformation of liability in the changing economic and political environment.