"This book concerns the politics of ghostwriters and their place in two worlds. First, it shadows lawyers in several national contexts in Europe as they choreograph legal actions and judicial decisions for others, triggering important policy reforms and institutional changes. In probing the influence of these actors in the social world, this book secondarily aims to rectify their place in the research world. The forging of the world's sole supranational polity in Europe has spurred troves of perceptive scholarship. Therein, you will be hard-pressed to come across even passing references to the protagonists of this book. And yet, many policymakers and jurists who witnessed firsthand the tortuous construction of the European Union (EU) and its legal order will likely know exactly who and what this book is about. They might even dismiss its findings as obvious. Yet well into the seven years it took to produce this manuscript, the implicit narrative that the following pages make explicit was hardly obvious to me. It took months before its contours became perceptible, years before I felt like I had a grip. In your hands is my imperfect yet best effort to piece this story together for you, in a more mercifully compressed span of time"--