The Directorate-General for Legal Service is a Directorate-General of the European Commission.
The Legal Service provides comprehensive in-house assistance to the European Commission and all its departments. Its resources have to be deployed to cover all Commission activities and areas of responsibility. In each area, it must be able to assist the Commission in its functions of drafting legislation and conducting international negotiations, as guardian of the treaties and in the exercise of the implementing powers conferred on it by the Community legislator or by the Treaties.
The service is responsible for ensuring all proposals made have a legal basis, if it finds a technical fault in any proposal then the proposal must be modified or dropped. The legal service may only be overruled by the College of Commissionners. As the service is under the President's remit, some argue it can be useful in allowing the President a way of sinking undesirable proposals from his colleagues as there is usually some technicality the service can raise - although they have been challenged in the European Court of Justice with some minimal success.
Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or service:
“Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you ... take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“I can counterfeit the deep tragedian,
Speak, and look back, and pry on every side,
Tremble and start at wagging of a straw,
Intending deep suspicion. Ghastly looks
Are at my service like enforced smiles,
And both are ready in their offices
At any time to grace my stratagems.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)