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 LS08CH22-Madsen ARI 28 September 2012
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16:5
The Force of Law and
Lawyers: Pierre Bourdieu and
the Reexive Sociology of Law
Yves Dezalay1 and Mikael Rask Madsen2
1
Centre National de la Recherche Scientique (CNRS), 75794 Paris, France;
email: Dezalay@msh-paris.fr
2
Faculty of Law and Director of iCourts, the Danish National Research Foundations
Centre of Excellence for International Courts, University of Copenhagen, DK-1455
Copenhagen, Denmark; email: mikael.madsen@jur.ku.dk, http://www.jur.ku.dk/icourts
Keywords
globalization of law, legal profession, sociolegal methodology
Abstract
Looking back 25 years after the publication of Pierre Bourdieus seminal
article The Force of Law, we inquire into the background for the
weak reception of his work in law and society studies. We argue that
the differences in the conceptions of law, state, and society between US
law and society scholarship and French historical sociology have made
it hard to transfer the theory across the Atlantic. We further contend
that the impact of Bourdieus work has generally been reduced by how
it has been perceived as yet another French theory. It has thus been
decoupled from perhaps its greatest strength, namely, the underlying
notion of sociology as a reexive practice. Against this background, this
article sets out to reconnect the practice of Bourdieusian sociology with
its conceptual framework and, in so doing, demonstrate its potentially
central role in the sociology of law.
433
 LS08CH22-Madsen
Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2012.8:433-452. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
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ARI 28 September 2012 16:5
INTRODUCTION
When Pierre Bourdieu, in 1986, published his
article La force du droit (French version in
1986; English version: Bourdieu 1987), nu-
merous sociologists of law and law and society
scholars openly welcomed it.1 The mere fact
that one of the greatest living sociologists made
a signicant contribution to the eld of the
sociology of law in itself provided legitimacy, if
not symbolic power, to the discipline.2 In 1991,
at the Joint Meeting of the Law and Society
Association and the Research Committee on
the Sociology of Law in Amsterdam, Bourdieu
was even invited to give the keynote speech.
In this light, one would perhaps expect that
Bourdieus work had gained prominence
within the circles of law and society. A Google
Scholar count, however, shows that the En-
glish translation of La force du droit (The
Force of Law) has only been quoted some
750 timesa low number in the context of
Bourdieus work. A closer look at the citations
in the area of law and society further suggests
that many references are what Bourdieu
himself would have described as ornementale:
They are rarely genuine attempts of deploying
Bourdieusian sociology in the context of law
and for the most part are limited to citing a few
conceptsnotably forms of capitalor theo-
retical exegeses. This raises the question of why
there has been such weak reception in the eld
of law and society for the work of a sociologist
who for years was the most quoted social scien-
tist in the world. (For an analysis of the general
reception of Bourdieus work in US sociology,
see, e.g., Lamont 2012, Sallaz & Zavisca 2007.)
To a large extent, the weak reception of
Bourdieu is due to the singular focus on the
article The Force of Law, which provides
only the outline of a research agenda in
terms of developing a sociology of law using
1
In this article, the terms sociology of law and law and
society are used interchangeably.
2
Similarly, other leading sociologists subsequently had mo-
ments of particular impact in the aftermath of publications in
the area of sociology of lawfor example, Jurgen Habermas
(1992) and Bruno Latour (2002).
434 Dezalay Madsen
Bourdieusian insights.3 We argue in this article
that Bourdieus work on law is generally found
elsewhere and mostly in his many writings on
the state (cf. Bourdieu 2012, Madsen & Deza-
lay 2002), as well as in the work of his closest
collaborators. Bourdieus limited interest in
further pursuing the analysis suggested in The
Force of Law was both institutional and social:
In a later work, he makes reference to the
jurists, with whom I never had many afni-
ties (Bourdieu 2004, p. 54), and his various
attempts at collaborating with lawyers at the
College de France generally failed; The law,
mais quel dommage! was his telling reaction to
one student informing him he had decided to
prepare for the competitive entrance exam to
the French State administration (Lenoir 2006,
p. 18). French legal academia responded reso-
lutely to Bourdieus trespasses into law, labeling
his work antijuristic (Caillosse 2004). Yet,
this backlash only emblematically conrmed
Bourdieus opening argument in The Force
of Law that a rigorous legal science must
necessarily break with the symbolic violence of
law and its corresponding orthodoxythat is,
the rigid juridisme of the legal eld.
The seemingly weak reception of Bourdieu-
sian sociology in law and society scholarship
has, however, little to do with Bourdieus
skirmishes with lawyers and legal academia
in France (on the latter, see Villegas 2004). It
is above all due to two key issues concerning
structure and practice. First, there are some
deep structural differences in the very con-
ceptions of law, state, and society between US
law and society scholarship and French his-
torical sociology in the tradition of Bourdieu.
Bourdieus model is empirically grounded in a
continental European model of law, probably
more Germanic than French, and does not
3
In practice, at his research center in Paris, the sociological
work on law was outsourced to younger more specialized re-
searchers, including the authors of this article. Consequently,
the actual adaptation of Bourdieusian thinking to the sociol-
ogy of law is found largely in the work of his collaborators.
In this scholarship, The Force of Law hardly gures as the
central piece of Bourdieus work.
 LS08CH22-Madsen ARI 28 September 2012 16:5
easily lend itself to the set of questions that have
been at the heart of US law and society studies
of, for example, legal professions, ranging
from the market control (Abel 1991) to ideo-
logical activism (Sarat & Scheingold 1997) to
functionalist ideals (Halliday & Karpik 1998).
Adapting Bourdieus approach implies rst and
foremost reexamining the geneses of the state,
law, and legal professions in different legal-
cultural contexts. Moreover, to conduct such
an analysis entails deploying not only a select
number of concepts but also the sociological
practice of Bourdieusian sociology. This leads
Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2012.8:433-452. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
us to the second and perhaps greatest problem
in the reception of Bourdieunamely, the
general reduction of Bourdieus work to yet
by Copenhagen University on 10/30/12. For personal use only.
another French theory, whereby its integral
ambition of developing a reexive sociology
is entirely overlooked (cf. Bigo 2011, Bigo &
Madsen 2011, Madsen 2011b). Looking back
25 years after the publication in English of
The Force of Law, academic reception to
that article ironically conrms the analysis
proposed by Bourdieu (2002) in his seminal
article Les conditions sociales de la circulation
internationale des idees: His text has been
circulated but without either its intellectual or
empirical context. A great deal of mistransla-
tion has taken place, which as a result has both
weakened Bourdieus theory scientically and
reduced its heuristic utility.
In this light, it is perhaps not surprising that
in the eld of law and society studies, the so-
ciology of Bourdieu has been relegated from
the front row to the more obscure chambers
of specialists, speaking their own accented lan-
guage. This article seeks to remedy some of
these problems of mistranslation by focusing
on the two problems mentioned above: struc-
tural difference in the understanding of law
and society and the decoupling of Bourdieusian
theory from its sociological practice. The article
is structured as follows.4 In the rst half, we
4
Some parts of the article are derived from previous publi-
cations, in particular Dezalay & Madsen (2006, 2009) and
Madsen & Dezalay (2002). The second part of the article
borrows from Madsen (2006). That said, we present in this
outline the key elements of a reexive sociology
of law by comparing The Force and Law with
Bourdieus encounter with law more generally.
In subsequent parts, drawing on both this more
abstracted discussion and our own empirical
work on inter- and transnational legal elds, we
describe the possibility of turning the general
analytical scheme presented into a sociologi-
cal practice. Throughout this article, it is our
central argument that the most signicant con-
tribution that Bourdieusian sociology can make
to the sociology of law is not by selective trans-
plantation of concepts (eld, habitus, etc.) but
by the deployment of these concepts as research
tools in combination with an understanding of
perhaps the greatest promise of Bourdieusian
sociology in the area of law and society: the
notionand practiceof a reexive sociology.
ELEMENTS OF A REFLEXIVE
SOCIOLOGY OF LAW
As already indicated, using The Force of Law
as a starting point for understanding Bour-
dieus encounter with law leads in many ways
to a dead end. Although his article provides
interesting observations of the inner workings
of law, particularly legal form and language (see
below for a more detailed discussion), it is not
representative of Bourdieus actual scientic
aim and interest in law. In the broader project,
he is concerned, rst, with law as a historical
and social construction produced in part by
legal agents in competition with other agents
and, second, as demonstrated in The Force of
Law, with law as a discourse of power, which
is part of the construction of the state as it
contributes to its legitimacy. Consequently,
the form of sociology of law that can be derived
from Bourdieus work concerns a set of issues
linked to the power of law, lawyers, and legal
culture and is developed in a variety of his em-
pirical studies covering vast areas of social life
(for an overview, see Madsen 2011b, p. 260).
article a far more comprehensive as well as updated analysis
than what is found in the previous publications on related
issues. All translations from French to English are our own.
www.annualreviews.org The Force of Law and Lawyers 435
 LS08CH22-Madsen
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ARI 28 September 2012 16:5
For the same reasons, although law can in
principle be studied in terms of a legal eld, the
approach generally places law, its institutions,
and its agents in the broader context of laws
interrelationship with social forces other than
those immediately at stake only in the micro-
cosm of law. Hence, what becomes the eld
of inquiry following a Bourdieusian research
logic is not what is most often presented
simply as the legal system but rather as more
specic and specialized areas of practicefor
example, human rights, international commer-
cial arbitration, European legal integration,
international criminal law, etc. (e.g., Cohen
2010, Dezalay & Garth 1996, Hagan & Levi
2005, Madsen 2010, Vauchez 2010). Moreover,
following the same logic of inquiry, elds are
not contained or closed entities but rather
spaces of practices that remain in competition
with other elds (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992,
p. 97). The legal eld itself is marked by a
division of juridical labor that reects its vary-
ing ties to other elds, for example, the elds
of state power, academia, the business world,
etc. It also has broad commonalities, notably
a set of mental and institutional structures,
that inuence all legal agents in the ongoing
struggles over dening and dividing the terrain
of law, struggles that are hardly discernible due
to the collective interest in publicly presenting
a more xed and coherent profession of law.
But for these exact reasons, any sociological
inquiry into law that is situated too close to the
orthodoxy of law runs the risk of being trapped
by this logic of domination and, thus, becoming
legally biased. To our view, and certainly to
Bourdieus, this is the single biggest problem
in the sociology of law (Bourdieu 1987, p. 818).
In this light, it is perhaps not surprising that
the two main areas left open to sociological
inquiry within a still dominant legal science
are (a) the sociology of the legal profession and
(b) the intellectual contre-feux to the hegemony
of law in terms of an engaged involvement
in social movements by promoting access to
justice and new rights for minorities and other
dominated segments of society (the de facto
trademark of much law and society research).
436 Dezalay Madsen
Although both forms of inquiry seem present in
Bourdieus work, the Bourdieusian engagement
differs considerably from mainstream law and
society studies in both regards. With respect to
activist-academic engagement in the struggles
of the disadvantaged, Bourdieu was himself
very much an engaged public intellectual with a
global reputation, particularly after publication
and translation of La misere du monde (French
version in 1993; English version: Bourdieu
1999). His scientic position in this regard was
nonetheless very different from that of most
activist law and society scholarship due to his
incessant aim of objectivizing the object,
even in his seemingly more political writings.
The opening pages of The Force of Law
provide an indication of this scientic position
with regard to law: Although, in line with most
sociology of law, he rejects legal formalism, he
equally discards legal instrumentalism and ar-
gues in favor of what he terms a rigorous science
of law: a legal science that takes seriously legal
form and discourse but with the understanding
that the relative autonomy that law enjoys is
the product of the specic historical conditions
that made autonomy possible in terms of the
production and reproduction of a distinct corpus
juris (Bourdieu 1987, pp. 81415). Hence, the
aim is not the same as that of the typical critical
sociologist in terms of pursuing moral-political
ideals in order to denounce certain social
practices. It is a sociological engagement that
by its demasking of power and domination
inevitably calls for actionor in the words
of one of Bourdieus early collaborators, Luc
Boltanski (2008), a social science that renders
reality inacceptable.
Following a similar scientic logic, the soci-
ology of Bourdieu does not attempt to provide
a sociology of the legal profession in a conven-
tional manner. The usual framing of sociolegal
inquiry is problematic for the same reasons
that studying law in terms of, for example, a
legal system provides a legally biased precon-
guration of the object of inquiry. According
to Bourdieu, [The notion of] profession is a folk
concept which has been uncritically smuggled
into scientic language and which imports
 LS08CH22-Madsen ARI 28 September 2012 16:5
into a whole social unconscious. It is the social
product of a historical work of construction of a
group and of a representation of groups that has
surreptitiously slipped into the science of this
very group. This is why this concept works
so well, or too well in a way . . . (Bourdieu
& Wacquant 1992, pp. 24243; emphasis in
original). The basic problem with dening
the object of inquiry, in this case a profession,
according to what seems to be common sense
is that it uncritically integrates into the analysis
the very historical and social construction of
an increasingly specic group of agents, which
Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2012.8:433-452. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
should be the precise object of study. Hence,
Bourdieu notes that it works too wellthe job
has already been done by the profession itself,
by Copenhagen University on 10/30/12. For personal use only.
but for entirely different purposes than social
scientic inquiry. In other words, the com-
monsense notion of profession tends to present
a profession as an idealized representation of a
homogeneous group performing tasks beyond
their class and general social originand all
this with the goal of enhancing the symbolic
power of that social group. This, according to
Bourdieu, hardly qualies as a scientic object.
The alternative offered in Bourdieusian
sociology is to turn things around and study
the processes of group formation. (The classic
example is Boltanski 1982.) To study processes
of group formation with regard to legal pro-
fessionals implies asking the question of how
law and lawyers came aboutthat is, to study
the different geneses of law in the context of
varying legal-political and -cultural settings
(Dezalay & Garth 2010, pp. 2131). This is al-
most a textbook example of what Bourdieu at an
early stage sought to explain with the notion of
the double rupture. His aim was to construct
a more scientically autonomous object of
research in the social sciences as opposed to an
object of inquiry that is essentially based on the
intuitive readings and spontaneous classica-
tions that always offer themselves as the point
of departure for analysis (Bourdieu et al. 1991).
This search for objectivization is, however, not
restricted to the research object as such but also
implies a critical examination of the dominant
academic preconstructions of the specic
subject area in question (i.e., a critical analysis
of the research tradition and the application of
that tradition by the researcher). This double
skepticism is what Bourdieu initially termed
the double rupture and later reexive
sociology in the context of the notion of eld.
With regard to rereading the geneses of law,
lawyers, and the state, this Bourdieusian turn
to reexive sociology basically implies a double
historicization (i.e., a historicization of both
the object and the academic construction of
that object). This entails developing a genuine
sociological inquiry guided by sociological
systemization and questions and not by the
political, legal, or moral stakes of the subject in
question. Basically, the double rupture serves
as a tool for opening the black box of the
object in question and, against that backdrop,
for recreating it as a genuine sociological object
in a pre-Latourian sense of black boxing
(Latour 1987, pp. 23). Because of the long
and particular history of law and the legal
profession and the historically different roles
and positions of law and lawyers with respect
to state and society, this object is at all levels
marked by a series of wide-ranging impenses
that is, structures inscribed and concealed in the
subject that further allow for projecting differ-
ent and often very well-camouaged interests
in the object (cf. Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992).
Consequently, objectivizing the research ob-
ject of law, lawyers, and state and society calls
for somehow establishing the object of inquiry
beyond these stakes and interests, yet in a way
that allows them to be taken seriously as part of
the object of inquiry, as discussed above. This
can be best illustrated by a brief outline of the
geneses of law, lawyers, and the modern state.
In The Force of Law, Bourdieu provides
only a glimpse of the evolution of the state, law,
and the legal profession, although the articles
argument in many ways presupposes such an
analysis. What it offers in terms of analysis of
the juridical eld is mostly based on continental
European law, and probably a more Germanic
than French variant thereof. It is centered on
the power of legal doctrine and particularly
legal language in turning social reality into legal
www.annualreviews.org The Force of Law and Lawyers 437
 LS08CH22-Madsen
Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2012.8:433-452. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
by Copenhagen University on 10/30/12. For personal use only.
ARI 28 September 2012 16:5
reality and the way in which the keepers of that
poweran increasingly institutionalized legal
professiongradually constructed for them-
selves a key position in the management and
evolution of the state (cf. Bourdieu 1994,
pp. 99145). Bourdieu specically highlights
how lawnot unlike theology and medicine
is an academic discipline with clear socio-
political applications. For the same reason, the
jurists, including academic jurists, do not seek
universal knowledge simply for the sake of uni-
versality but also as practical solutions to soci-
etal problems. Therein lies its signicant poten-
tial both as an individual applied science and,
particularly, as a science of the statethat is,
a science for and of the state (Bourdieu et al.
2000). But because of its practical impact in
terms of providing solutions to concrete social
problems, law is in perpetual need of masking
itself. In his analysis of the force of law, Bour-
dieu therefore points to the appropriation ef-
fect of legal language (i.e., the ways in which le-
gal discourse transforms elements of common
language into specialized legal terms) (Bour-
dieu 1987, pp. 81920). Law thereby produces
a rhetoric of universality and neutrality: On one
hand, universality is expressed by the generality
of the law in reference to trans-subjective val-
ues that presuppose the existence of an ethical
consensus and by the use of formulas that leave
little room for individual variation; on the other
hand, neutrality is expressed by the use of pas-
sive and impersonal grammatical constructions,
helping normative expressions to appear neu-
tral. The outcome of these deeply intertwined
linguistic processes is the symbolic power of law
as a tool for ordering politics without neces-
sarily doing politics. Moreover, it is a specic
juridical capital possessed only by those in the
position to exercise the symbolic power of law.
What is lacking in The Force of Law,
however, is an analysis of those different histor-
ical conditions under which the relative force
of law and legal language is made possible. In
this respect, the analysis is clearly based on a
particular view of law and the state in which
formalized law and legal doctrine play a major
role. In other words, it is focused on what
438 Dezalay Madsen
comparative lawyers typically present as an
ideal-typical continental legal model in which
the power of law is closely connected to the
formalism of lawas opposed to common law
pragmatism. Bourdieus later writings reveal a
far more complex picture, opening for rethink-
ing the genesis of law, jurists, and the state in
terms of a plurality of models emerging even
within Europe since the thirteenth century. In
particular, his posthumously published College
de France lectures from the period 19891992
(Bourdieu 2012) offer almost exactly what is
absent in The Force of Law.5 In these lec-
tures, the role of lawyers in the autonomization
of politics and state is highlighted but with an
emphasis on the empirical contingencies of the
actual outcomes. According to Bourdieu, [I]t
is the jurists who, through their battles within
the legal eld, constitute a sort of practical
metaphor of what becomes the political eld
(Bourdieu 2012, p. 529). This conversion from
early law to modern politics is a historically
long process in which the jurists not only
change camp between church and early state
but also turn the church against the church
to construct the state (Bourdieu 2012, p. 526).
In all cases, the jurists rely on their symbolic
resources of words and concepts (Bourdieu
2012, pp. 52124), which in combination with
their unique ability to blend universality and
private interest help them gradually conquer an
increasingly autonomous space in state and so-
ciety and, thereby, rationalize the state in their
own image. Although Bourdieus empirical
analysis is based primarily on the genesis of the
modern state through the emergence of the bu-
reaucratic eld (Bourdieu 1994), restraining its
relevance to only Franco-Germanic legal his-
tory overlooks the broader heuristic value of the
analysis. Bourdieus studies of the state and the
role of law and jurists in this construction pro-
vide a more general analysis of how lawyers in
culturally different settings have conquered key
5
Prior to the publication of these lectures, the main analyses
were found in the many articles published around the re-
search project of the state nobility and the bureaucratic eld
(cf. Bourdieu 1994, 1996).
 LS08CH22-Madsen ARI 28 September 2012 16:5
positions by constructing the force of law. In
many ways, the actual empirical work remains
to be done, but what is clear from his analysis
is that law does not prescribe a singular moral-
political stance but rather a plurality of options.
The key position of French lawyers both before
and after the French Revolution more than
anything sheds light on this ability to adapt to
power and to carefully maintain the force of law
under changing social and political conditions
(Bourdieu 2012, p. 514). In other words, there
is no predetermined path for law and lawyers
but rather an evolution of legal forms and
Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2012.8:433-452. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
institutions that calls for empirical exploration.
THE GLOBALIZATION OF LAW
by Copenhagen University on 10/30/12. For personal use only.
AS FIELDS OF PRACTICE
The above very brief outline of some key dy-
namics of the emergence of law and state is cen-
tral to understanding the application of reex-
ive sociology in the area of law. Above all, the
Bourdieusian approach allows for understand-
ing the possible paths for lawyers in the forma-
tion of modern society, ranging from defenders
of public virtue to clerks of an advanced bu-
reaucracy. It is thus different from both Marxist
and normative functionalist accounts, which
operate with the assumption that law is either
instrumentalized political ideology or modern
societys substitution of morality with a liberal
ideology of rights as the device for social coher-
ence. This is where Bourdieusian reexive so-
ciology of law most fundamentally differs from
mainstream law and society scholarship: The
Bourdieusian perspective is not normative in its
approach but focused on how law is constructed
out of power and regardless of who is in power
(for a striking example, see Madsen 2000).
Here, we do not attempt to provide empirical
analysis of a cross section of processes of law, ju-
rists, and state formation around the world (for
an analysis of key countries in Latin America,
Asia, and Europe, see Dezalay & Garth
2002, Dezalay & Garth 2010, and Madsen
2010, respectively). Instead, we limit our focus
to the sociology of the internationalization
and globalization of law, as this allows for an
analysis of the frontier of law, a frontier where
the geneses of law are once again unfolding.
The concept of the eld developed by
Bourdieu offers a number of heuristic advan-
tages for the study of new and open objects
such as those encountered in the context of the
globalization of law. The relatively open-ended
denition of a eld as a network of objective re-
lations provides a broad conceptual ground for
analyzing both the social continuities and the
construction of new practices. Moreover, this
approach emphasizes what is often downplayed
in the context of weakly institutionalized inter-
national legal practices, namely, social interests
and class. The eld approach also underscores
the generally adversarial nature of social prac-
tices and the political and institutional effects
of sociolegal struggles over domination. What
makes the return to such basic sociological
issues seem further justied in the context of
the internationalization of law is the obser-
vation that international strategies are often
directly related to national processes of social
and legal reproduction. More specically,
such strategies often correspond with national
social hierarchies to the extent that they are
intertwined with an attempt to revalorize the
capital of national, often cosmopolitan, elites as
a way of maintaining their elite positions. The
continuous reconstruction of international or
European legal practices is inuenced, among
other things, by such a system of reproduction,
because of the ways in which it offers the means
for securing and converting social positions
in a continuously evolving class structure that
extends to the international level.
As concerns law and lawyers, this has a
particular interest. Owing to the interdepen-
dence of the emergence of modern law and
the construction of the modern state, jurists
have inherently been agents of state expertise
(e.g., Kantorowitz 1961). This embeddedness
of jurists in the modern state also allowed
them to play central parts in the international
import and export of state knowledge and
institutions, rst as medieval mediators and
diplomats between city states (Brundage 2008,
Martines 1968) and much later as actual
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ARI 28 September 2012 16:5
international lawyers (Koskenniemi 2001,
Sacriste & Vauchez 2005). In practice, this
entailed a very long historical process of
both institutionalization and legitimization,
in which the actual force of international law
well into the late nineteenth century was very
much subject to the interaction and clashes of
imperial European societies (Madsen & Deza-
lay 2002, Madsen & Vauchez 2004). In other
words, the idea of an autonomous practice of
international law and a corresponding profes-
sion of international lawyers was very far from
accomplished. Instead, a group of internation-
alist lawyer-politicians with signicant social
and political resources shared the business of
international relations with a similarly exclusive
group of cosmopolitan state notables trading
in state expertise. This small cosmopolitan
elite enjoyed the privilege of typically being
members of not only a national higher class
but also an international cosmopolitan class.
This exclusive practiceand clubwas
eventually transformed by the intensication
in both legal and political interaction during
the twentieth century, which eventually led to
signicant investments in international and,
perhaps particularly, European supra- and
international institutions. Thus, international
law and relations went from being the domin-
ion of a small club to starting to attract a far
broader group of agents, who competitively
sought to construct new international and
European venues congured around their own
specic expertises. Although the histories of
both the League of Nations and the United
Nations over the past century exhibit the
cumbersome progress of international insti-
tutions (cf. Mazower 2009), international and
European law nevertheless went from being an
affair between legal gentlemen, conducted in
closed elite networks, to eventually becoming
part of increasingly differentiated elds of
practice during the period. Yet, this does not
imply, as it is nevertheless often assumed, that
transnational elites vanished from international
affairs and were replaced by a social segment of
professionals (cf. Kauppi & Madsen 2012). The
area of international commercial arbitration
440 Dezalay Madsen
provides a telling example of how the domi-
nation of the eld by a traditional European
internationalist elite of grand professors was
challenged by the arrival of a Wall Street law
rmbased practice of arbitration. However,
the outcome was not a complete collapse of the
European business but a general restructuring
of the eld, integrating this new line of opposi-
tion (Dezalay & Garth 1996). Recent research,
some of it inspired by the renewed interest in
notions of hegemony and empire, also points
to the often overlooked but nevertheless very
central role played by elites in globalization.
Examples include Huntingtons (2005) Davos
Man, Rothkopf s (2008) global superclass,
Sklairs (2001) transnational capitalist class,
and even Jacksons (2005) globalizers, the
international community of development
workers. But most of this literature has a
different objective, namely to denounce the
denationalizing effects of global elites. We
suggest instead examining legal agents as
transnational power elites (Kauppi & Mad-
sen 2012), that is, as social groups rooted in
society, national and international, and with
the goal of exploring the battles over the
structuration of transnational elds of law.
This is linked to observations of the struc-
tural effects of changes in international prac-
tices over the past decades. Generally, by the
twentieth century transformation of interna-
tional law and legal practice, the very distinction
between the international and the national
traditionally based upon the legal dichotomy
between inter-state and domestic affairswas
itself challenged. In more conceptual terms, one
can observe a certain transnationalization of the
notion of the international (cf. Slaughter 2002)
via the emergence of increasingly autonomous
legal elds in specic subject areas at the cross-
roads of national and international law. The
latter is what a number of researchers have now
labeled the functional differentiation of inter-
national law, assuming a perhaps overly legalist
view of the actual differentiation of interna-
tional law (e.g., Koskenniemi & Leino 2002).
Yet, what is certain is that these processes of
internationalization and transnationalization,
 LS08CH22-Madsen ARI 28 September 2012 16:5
both in terms of international transformations
of national practices and the proliferation
of international law and institutions, pose a
challenge to the conventional understandings
of law; that is, they call for research methods
that can comprehend the complexity of in-
terdependent social elds that, at face value,
claim to be autonomous beyond the state but
nevertheless are deeply embedded in a national
conguration of law and power (cf., e.g., Sassen
2006). It is our claim that the Bourdieusian
concept of eld provides a particularly suitable
theoretical starting point for studying what in
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practice is a growing number of differentiated
and increasingly institutionalized elds of
transnational legal practice.
by Copenhagen University on 10/30/12. For personal use only.
Conceptually, a eld is a place for struggle
between different agents where different posi-
tions are held based on the amount and forms
of capital. In Bourdieus own words, it is a net-
work, or a conguration, of objective relations
between positions. These positions are objec-
tively dened, in their existence and in the
determinations they impose upon their occu-
pants, agents or institutions, by their present
and potential situation (situs) in the structure of
the distribution of species of power (or capi-
tal) whose possession commands access to the
specic prots that are at stake in the eld, as
well as by their objective relation to other po-
sitions (domination, subordination, homology,
etc.). (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992, p. 97)
In more operative terms, the emergence of
a eld implies a degree of structural consis-
tency and autonomy, meaning a set of objec-
tive and symbolic relations between agents and
institutions around increasingly specic issues.
Through this process, a eld constructs its own
particular symbolic economy in terms of the
valorization of specic combinations and forms
of capital (social, economic, political, legal,
etc.). The process of capitalization results from
the struggle between the agents over gaining
dominant positions in this social space, a pro-
cess fueled by interest, dedication, belief, etc., in
the issues at stake. But above all, it is a struggle
concerning the dominant visions and divisions
of the eld itself, which conversely help create
not only the elds logic and taken for granted
limits (doxa) but also its consecration mecha-
nisms, enabling the translation of the external
world into the specic code and issues of the
eld. Thus, a eld is a social space composed of
competing positions. It has a more structured
center of gravity where the effects of the eld
are most strongly felt, while the effects eventu-
ally diminish at its outskirts. Consequently, and
essentially different from a systems theoretical
conception of law, there are no xed boundaries
of elds. This conversely allows for studying the
crossroads of elds (e.g., how neighboring elds
are mutually inuential or how the evolution of
transnational legal elds is taking place interde-
pendently with national legal transformations).
Because the emergence of a new eld
almost always has its roots in other elds and,
in the case of transnational legal elds, in more
national modes of producing law, the import-
export of different social logics to transnational
elds becomes an issue of particular sociolog-
ical interest for understanding these processes
of structuration. In this light, exploring basic
sociological issues, such as doctrines, modes of
education and reproduction, paths to access,
and denitions of competences, becomes cen-
tral for understanding institutional processes
of autonomization and legitimization. As the
discussion above suggests, a key component
and dynamic of the eld is found in the prac-
tices of the agents. They are the authors of the
performative acts providing for the circulation
of ideas and concepts between elds, as agents
by denition always operate in more elds
(Bourdieu 2002). In order to examine these
crucial relations between agents and social
structures, Bourdieusian research tools such as
the notions of habitus and symbolic power are
deployed with the goal of exploring this more
subjective level (i.e., the structuring level) of
the eld in combination with an analysis of the
structures of the eld. This is also the point at
which Bourdieusian social theory potentially
violates the basic premises of Bourdieusian
reexive sociology. The notion of habitus
poses a double challenge in this regard. On one
hand, even if its intellectual origins are more
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ARI 28 September 2012 16:5
complex, the notion is infused by a long series
of empirical studies of French society (most
famously, Bourdieu 1984, 1996) and has, for
many, come to reect a specic and nationally
informed social reality. On the other hand,
but closely connected, the notion seems to
work best in highly structured national elds.
Needless to say, both aspects are problematic
with regard to applying habitus to transnational
elds that are neither French nor particularly
stable. The solution is both conceptual and
empiricalthat is, with respect to the former,
to accept that transnational or international
elds are rarely structured in ways that entirely
mimic national elds and in practice encompass
much greater diversity and, with respect to
latter, to avoid imposing too nationally dened
preunderstandings of transnational elds by
carefully exploring the actual dynamics at play.
Habitus is generally dened as the inter-
nalized schemes guiding agents behavior. It
is a practical sense of reality that is acquired
throughout the agents particular and indi-
vidual trajectory (Bourdieu 1977). Yet, as
demonstrated in a number of previous studies
of transnational elds, leading international
players typically pursue both international
and national careers (Dezalay & Garth 1996,
Madsen 2010). This enables them to valorize
their capital and knowledge in more places,
even to shift identity and ultimately exercise
double (or even triple) strategies from their
multiplenational and internationalsocial
positions (Bourdieu in Dezalay & Garth 1996,
pp. viiviii). Contributing to the structuration
of transnational elds, these multiple strategies
are important to the import-export between
elds. But with regard to understanding the
habitus of these agents, the notion can be
applied only with the understanding that the
agents are somehow more schizophrenic on
the international than on the national level.
In other words, the notion of habitus can be
employed in the analysis but only in a more in-
dicative and exible fashion. Law degrees from
two different top universities, known nationally
as well as internationally, for example Harvard
and Oxford, have different values nationally
442 Dezalay Madsen
than internationally. Moreover, the socializa-
tion the agent has gone through at the specic
law school produces different outlooks on the
national and international levels. Yet, what
nevertheless restructures and reorganizes these
behavioral schemes is the fact that agents on the
international level also tend to organize around
professional identitieseven if these are
relatively different if compared nationally. The
challenge is therefore both methodological
and empiricalnamely, to capture how inter-
and transnational elds at a single point in time
present both a relatively autonomous structure
and an unsettled melange of different outlooks
and ideas on the very same issue. This only
underscores the need to avoid deploying the
notion of habitus as a freestanding concept and
instead apply it in combination with the concept
of eld, which allows for a double observation
of social practice as both stable and adversarial.
The other key notion from the Bourdieusian
toolbox, symbolic power, provides a further key
to uncovering the complex symbolic economy
of transnational legal elds at the crossroads of
the national and the international levels of law
(Dezalay & Madsen 2006). As demonstrated in
Bourdieus work on the emergence of the state,
retracing the various battles and processes of
dening the state provides a view into the labo-
ratory of what might now be taken for granted:
the law, the state agencies, etc. (Bourdieu 1994,
p. 101). A good example of similar processes
of naturalization (via neutralization) and uni-
versalization is the construction of European
integration. Europe generally tends to natural-
ize and universalize its social constructions and
does so to such an extent that the researcher en-
tering this space of symbolic violence is prac-
tically compelled to rephrase Bourdieus funda-
mental research questionWhat is the state?
to What is Europe? (Bourdieu & Wacquant
1992). Regardless of the rhetoric deployed with
respect to the European Unionconstitution,
justice, and home affairs, etc.there is obvi-
ously no European state. Yet, there is a unique
social construction that bears resemblance to
the state because of the way it has been built
using state knowledge and models imported
 LS08CH22-Madsen ARI 28 September 2012 16:5
from member states and third-party countries,
in particular US models of federalism (Cohen
2007). Hence, Europe is, if anything, a hy-
brid, made up of the competitive forces of
the involved states as well as its historically
specic position vis-a-vis other states, notably
the United States during the Cold War
(Lundestad 2005). Moreover, contemporary
processes of economic and nancial globaliza-
tion have made Europe even more of a market
statesomething in between a market and
a statewhere the disaggregating European
nation-states compete over the denition of
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the terrain and the institutions. The European
Union is thus increasingly being made into a
prolongation of the European state, whereas
by Copenhagen University on 10/30/12. For personal use only.
individual nation-states are, as a result, reform-
ing themselves into market states. Hence, the
state in the national context is in some ways not
the same as the state in the European setting,
even if they are in many ways converging.
The same is also particularly true for both
law and lawyers having different characteristics
depending on the social universe in which
they intervene or act. The notion of sym-
bolic power becomes, in this regard, a tool
for understanding how the exchanges and
competition between different national and
international models are key to the structura-
tion of transnational legal elds. Conceptually,
symbolic power is the power to transform the
world by transforming the words for naming
it, by producing new categories of perception
and judgment, and by dictating a new vision
of social divisions and distributions (Bourdieu
1987, p. 839). More specically, the emergence
of any new eld functions both internally and
externally as a way of questioning and reden-
ing social hierarchies and power. This can be
observed in the social mechanisms that produce
nomenclatures, metiers, modes of education,
and generally other paths to power. One of the
key social mechanisms behind the production
of new structures is symbolic power. That fact
raises the pivotal question of how symbolic
power is distributed within a given eld.
There is obviously no simple answer except to
examine the structuration of the eld in ques-
tion in light of the processes of capitalizations
that have helped create the dominant positions.
This brings us back to the argument presented
throughout the previous sectionsnamely,
that the actual conguration of any legal eld
is historically contingent and, thus, a social
product that needs to be analyzed in light of
its historical process of construction. It is the
underlying claim of Bourdieusian sociology of
law that the application of the notions of eld,
capital, habitus, and symbolic power, in com-
bination with a reexive posture, provides the
sociological tools for such an empirical analysis.
LAWYERS AS GLOBAL
ENTREPRENEURS
Exploring the transnational developments of
law provides a particularly salient empirical
terrain for conducting this form of critical
and structural analysis of law. Not only is
the transnationalization of law an interesting
empirical development in itself, but it also
offers a unique sociological viewpoint for
reconsidering the production of both national
and international law. Using a transnational
starting point, which invariably also involves
elements of comparative analysis, in many ways
facilitates the outlined processes of deciphering
law and legal practices, as it helps to repose and
reframe a whole series of key questions related
to the foundational issues of law, politics, the
state, etc. Basically, it provides a way to break
with the historically ingrained structures of
law in national culture, language, and the state.
As Bourdieu (1987) points out at length in
The Force of Law (see also Latour 2002),
the very operation of law is based on a high
degree of social concealment: the formalist
separation between law and politics (and thus
social context) and the corresponding notion
of judges as simply la bouche de la loi, a notion
reproduced in the handy opposition between
the rule of law and the rule of man. At the
transnational level, however, law appears much
more open and multilinguistic than it does at
the national level. It thereby provides a more
transparent account of the social processes of
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producing and reproducing the force of law,
which also take place at the national level but
in a far more camouaged manner. Thus, a
central objective of this specic international
sociology of law is to devise research strategies
that help the research avoid and even evade
the strongly prescriptive discourses inevitably
involved in the production of law, both nation-
ally and internationally. One way to attain this
objective is to break with the functionalist view
of law permeating great parts of the sociology
of law. We suggest instead to study the actual
agents of law, not simply as the operators of
transnational law but also, and specically, as
the entrepreneurs building transnational legal
elds. Making the empirical object of inquiry
legal agents, as opposed to a self-describing and
self-referencing legal system, further allows
for posing actual sociological questions about
legal agency, which by denition are always
downplayed in national contexts of law by the
double concealment of law described above.
These concealed sociological issues include, for
example, social capital, the multipositioning of
legal agents both within and outside the law,
and other key social traits of any given societal
elite. The goal is not a prolongation of conven-
tional studies of the legal profession but rather
an analysis of the involvement of legal agents
in the fabrication of specic elds and the
formation of new transnational legal groupings.
Considering the history of international
relations and law, it is of course not surprising
that the transnationalization of law is deeply
inuenced by the import-export of national
and international ideas and strategies. It is at
the level of agency, however, that it becomes
transparent how the courtiers of the interna-
tional (Dezalay 2004) act on both national and
international levels of law and, thus, facilitate
these processes of exchange. They are basically
the entrepreneurs of these developments. To
give an example, two of the most central agents
of European integration with respect to the
European Coal and Steel Community and
the European Convention on Human Rights,
Robert Schuman and Pierre-Henri Teitgen,
very clearly pursued double careers on both
444 Dezalay Madsen
the national and European levels (Cohen &
Madsen 2007). Using their unique positions
and multiple specializations in politics and law,
they became both the couriers of the idea of
European integration and the middlemen of
the import-export between the multiple polit-
ical levels involved, helping to circulate both
national and foreign ideals, models, and inter-
ests. A number of studies have also underscored
the political, social, and legal importance of
the lack of clear boundaries between the
ideology of European integrationpolitically
or scienticallyand the basic national diplo-
matic interests in the building of Europe
(Cohen 1998, Cohen & Vauchez 2007, Kauppi
& Madsen 2007). From the outset, the very def-
inition of the boundaries of Europe became an
essential part of the strategy of institutionaliz-
ing this uncharted legal and political landscape.
For exactly these reasons, studying legal
entrepreneurs provides a tangible, empirical
object for examining these processes of deni-
tion and ultimately structuration as well as for
understanding how these more international
processes and struggles are interdependent
with national politics and legal ideas.
The heuristic value of making legal en-
trepreneurs the object of inquiry is that it fa-
cilitates an understanding not only of emerging
elds but also of the dynamics of more estab-
lished elds. It is self-evident that deeply struc-
tured elds, for example certain subelds of Eu-
ropean law, leave less space for entrepreneurs,
as they operate with more differentiated le-
gal knowledge and professional career patterns
than what was the case at their initial stages.
Nevertheless, the perspective is not thereby in-
apt. In-depth empirical analysis demonstrates
that professional-ideological and national-
international double strategies are pervasive not
only in new emergent transnational elds but
also in established ones. Particularly as concerns
the latter, this focus on legal entrepreneurs al-
lows for understanding dynamics of change that
would otherwise be entirely unattainable if in-
stitutions were too narrowly perceived as once-
and-for-all settled autonomous entities. One
striking example in this regard is the area of
 LS08CH22-Madsen ARI 28 September 2012 16:5
European environmental law. Deeply inu-
enced by the import-export between national
and European ideas and models, the history of
the eld of European environmental practices
illustrates how national players contributed to
the Europeanization of environmental policy
and law by using European venues to chal-
lenge national practices and vice versa (Dezalay
2007). Like many other activists of the British
Left of the 1980s, British environmentalists uti-
lized the European level to bypass, but also
to challenge, the national environmental poli-
cies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The
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main agents relied on both national and Euro-
pean resources in the pursuit of these strategies,
which effectively enabled them to reconstruct
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their positions both nationally and on the Eu-
ropean level. And at the end of the day, not
only English policy but also European policy
and law were changed. A very similar account
of change can be found in the area of European
human rights in which British lawyers who were
involved in the battle with Thatcherism during
the 1980s, in this case over civil rights and trade
unionism, also started using internationaland
particularly Europeanforums to relaunch and
revalorize their national strategies. As a by-
product, the integration and institutionaliza-
tion of European human rights were acceler-
ated (Madsen 2004).
These different cases related to the law
and politics of Europeanization more broadly
highlight the multiple identities of the key
players and how they utilize their positions in
multiplenational and internationalsocial
elds. Moreover, these ndings suggest that
inter- and transnational legal and political
constructions like Europe, to an extent, always
remain in the process of reconstruction vis-
a-vis the national levels. It is our claim that
the many and different processes of European
integration are intertwined with these various
interests and strategies; in fact, they are very
much the by-products of these strategies as
well (Cohen et al. 2007). This argument is both
empirical and methodological. It is apparent
that such double strategies are less easily played
out at the national level where agents, for a
number of reasons, are far less mobile in the
social structure. Inter- and transnational ter-
rains seem to offer much more versatile social
arenas for bypassing both social hierarchies
and categories, even after a relatively compre-
hensive institutionalization has taken place.
Analytically, this offers a unique possibility
for examining both the internal and external
construction of transnational legal elds by
following the practices of key agents of change.
Conceptually, it also means that the evolution
of inter- and transnational elds should not
be limited to simply the story of the building
of institutions and the political interaction of
states and increasingly other agents but perhaps
instead the story of a particular set of political
and legal opportunities, which in some cases
eventually resulted in institutions and law.
This particular and obviously deeply soci-
ological view of institutions generally suggests
a dynamic approach to transnational elds. It
highlights how inter- and transnational elds
from time to time function as catalysts for
signicant change, changes that would often be
entirely politically unachievable on the national
level where such strategies are much more con-
strained by formalized politics and institutional
frameworks. However, because of the way the
entrepreneurs of globalization tactically pursue
the international level, they can occasionally
accelerate social changes with great impact
on national politics and social congurations.
We have mentioned the two examples of
European environmental and human rights
law and politics. Both provide telling examples
of the instigation of such radical shifts through
European strategies. The original orthodoxy
of environmental regulation of the 1970s and
1980s in terms of control and command was
emblematically turned into a very different
market regulation of the environment during
the 1990s, with the help of industrious agents
tactically using the European opportunity
(Dezalay 2007); the area of European human
rights, in a somewhat comparable way, was used
to transform the national legal elds from the
mid-1980s, with entrepreneurial lawyers and
European judges inventing a new European
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doctrine of human rights that considerably
redened national conceptions of justice in the
member states (Madsen 2011a). This should
not be viewed as a phenomenon specic to these
two elds of practice but rather as a generaliz-
able feature of transnational elds, which both
sets them apart from national elds and explains
their salience in contemporary law and politics.
IN THE FIELD
As argued above, applying the Bourdieu-
sian conceptual toolsor thinking tools
(Leander 2008)in many ways requires
deploying the underlying idea of reexive
sociology. In practice, this calls for devising
actual research strategies that use the insights
of the conceptual tools in an actual sociological
practice. Thus, very different from the common
usage of Bourdieusian sociology in law and so-
ciety research, which employs a few concepts or
uses Bourdieus work only to theorize on a more
general level, we suggest that the real strength
of the approach is in its empirical application.
This, of course, alludes to a long-standing
debate with regard to the general reception of
Bourdieu in American sociology (cf. Lamont
2012) as well as other great French thinkers,
notably Michel Foucault. What is certainly
lost in translation is the relative uniqueness
of French human and social science and its
trademark of a combination of heavy theory
and extensive empirical research. This does
not travel all that well, particularly when it has
to t into preexisting departmental features of
academic life, in which the relative oppositions
of quantitative and qualitative research or
empirical and theoretical sociology set the
boundaries. In view of the approach presented
here, these are of course only false oppositions
and institutional limits to genuine scientic
inquiry. Bourdieusian reexive sociology
cannot be adequately deployed if it has to t
into such predetermined categories. Instead,
it calls for a sociological engagement that is
both conceptual and empirical at the very same
timethat is, a reexive engagement with
theory, method, and empirical data collection
as not only interdependent but also mutually
446 Dezalay Madsen
constitutive elements of sociological practice.
So far we have deployed the approach to discuss
theory and empirical ndings. In what follows,
we resume this analysis of transnational elds
with a particular focus on the third element,
the actual conduct of such an analysis.
The previous section generally highlighted
how transnational elds, when compared with
highly structured national elds, are struc-
turally more ambiguous. This relative ambigu-
ity is the background to the so-called double
games in terms of the agents usage of inter-
or transnational venues to advance national
interestsand vice versa. And because of the
strategic opportunities offered by international
elds and institutions, partly the effect of their
tendency towards perpetual transformation, the
boundaries between law and politics tend to
be less strict. This is also central to devel-
oping research strategies that can help the
researcher gain access to the deeper socio-
legal dynamics of the globalization of law. As
the agents in question here often rely on a num-
ber of double games, as well as multiple identi-
ties, the researcherif not very carefully trac-
ing these multiple movementsis capable nei-
ther of going beyond the very symbolic dis-
courses produced in these interactions nor of
escaping them. In the specic case of the so-
ciology of law, there is moreover often an ex-
plicit interest in integrating the work of the re-
searcher in these symbolic practices, as many
of the entrepreneurs of legal globalization rely
on academic and quasi-academic resources for
legitimizing their practices. In these social con-
texts in which the distinctions between political
and legal practices are at best vague, the sociol-
ogist of law, when seen from the point of view
of the agents, provides a perfect object for le-
gitimizing weakly institutionalized or legalized
practices. This is probably particularly exacer-
bated in the case of the sociology of law, as the
researcher is potentially a catalyst for providing
if not law then learned legal discourse on these
emerging legal structures. In many studies of
the globalization of law, this risk of adapting to
discourses of power and legitimacy is not seen
as a problem however. Particularly in the more
 LS08CH22-Madsen ARI 28 September 2012 16:5
activist forms of inquiry, the choice of empiri-
cal terrain is directly informed by the conver-
gence of scientic and political agendas. Yet,
in the sort of approach propounded in this ar-
ticle, such a choice poses a real problem, as it
essentially conicts with the underlying aim of
establishing a more objectively dened object
of inquiry.
The response to this dilemma, which can
be drawn from Bourdieus work, is for the
researcher both to follow the agents and their
actions in order to empirically document actual
movements and to seek to impose a different
Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2012.8:433-452. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
and scientically guided agenda. Basically, the
researcher has to follow the agents in order to
observe what is the alleged core of the game,
by Copenhagen University on 10/30/12. For personal use only.
but at the very same time he or she must also
examine and reframe the issues at play by, for
example, relating them to the agents multiple
national and international interests. In this
reexive engagement, the sociologist has the
advantage that he or she has far greater mobil-
ity within the eld than the actual agents who
by denition are more trapped by their specic
position in the eld. Closely connected, the so-
ciologist also has the advantage over the agents
that he or she can more objectively contrast
the positions within the eld. The agents per-
ceptions of the eld and its structures are based
upon subjective experiences, and they only
rarely share the global, structural view of the
eld that is the sociologists starting point and
ultimate scientic objective. Yet, the many and
different accounts being presented throughout
the research process provide critical data for
interrogating the agents and escaping their
neutralizing and naturalizing discourses. But to
do so, the sociologist necessarily must take full
advantage of his or her mobility in the eld.
In practice, and very different from the agents
maneuvering capabilities, the researcher can
interview the opposing camps, if not at the
same time then immediately after each other,
following a research logic that breaks with
the logic of the practices of the respective
agents. In fact, it is by following such a zigzag
course inside the eld that the researcher
can fully benet from the information gained
in previous stages of the research process,
including knowledge of personal bonds and
enmities. What we suggest here is basically
to turn the logic of eld inside out as a
means for deconstructing social practices and
reconstructing them in terms of elds.
This more qualitative form of eld analysis
has been applied in numerous inter- and
transnational settings. A guiding line of inquiry
in these studies of transnational elds has been
to study the relational networks and personal
trajectories of the agents of the elds in ques-
tion. Yet, these background social structures
are used not only to conduct prosopographical
analysis but also to explore the underlying
battles forming the structures of the eld, using
agents as the starting point: How are the agents
situated in more elds than the ones with which
they are immediately identied, and how do
they mobilize different capital in each of these
different social spheres? These more hidden
lines, which are revealed by analysis of the
agents multiple specializations, provide guid-
ance for moving beyond the dominantand
often naturalizedinstitutional and categorical
structures of the eld in question. Take, for
example, the fabrication of new legal expertise:
Notwithstanding the way in which legal exper-
tise is by denition presented as highly differ-
entiated knowledge, its transformation takes
place in the margin of ofcial categories or on
the frontiers of disciplines. This means that the
data needed for understanding such processes
of conversion are available only if one chal-
lenges the social categorieswhich are often
uncritically applied by the agents themselves
with the goal of reconstructing the sociopro-
fessional battles that have formed them. Such
an analysis is feasible only if the researcher has
multiple points of departure for retracing and
understanding the new social categories as the
outcome of both antagonistic positions and
subjective bonds. In other words, the described
mobility of the researcher within the eld is
absolutely key to conducting an analysis that
is formed both by the oppositions of positions
and by their subjective links, such as alliances
and networks.
www.annualreviews.org The Force of Law and Lawyers 447
 LS08CH22-Madsen
Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2012.8:433-452. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
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ARI 28 September 2012 16:5
The different research strategies we have
briey outlined all come down to the basic
problem of ensuring a scientic autonomy in
the engagement with normative discourses
that is, avoiding the sociologist being turned
into yet another double agent of globalization,
playing multilevel games. These strategies are
all building on the problem we discussed in
the initial section of this article concerning
what Bourdieu framed as the necessity of
a double rupture (Bourdieu et al. 1991).
This scientic ideal, which we refer to here
as reexivity, concerns, as noted, both the
subject and the researcher and is, at the end
of the day, related to the scientic process of
uncovering the agents (and the researchers)
orientations and predispositions and how these
shape their habits vis-a-vis other positions in
the eld (Champagne et al. 1999, p. 51). It thus
implies two very closely related actions: rst,
a critical reection on the preconstructions
that dominate a given subject area and, second,
a self-critique as the means to considering
ones own scientic and social assumptions
of the subject area. This is not an operation
that is done once and for all but is instead an
ongoing measure for questioning ndings and
the way they are gathered. In our research,
we have generally used qualitative interview
methods for mapping transnational elds.
More specically, we have applied a relational
biographic method as a measure for comparing
elements of individual trajectories with the
aim of bridging them in terms of a eld. The
approach has enabled us to assess the various
resourcesforms of networks, competences,
and capitalthat have been critical for creating
positions within specic elds. Basically, by
following the course by which a disputed
subject area has been established as a eld,
these studies have attempted to identify the key
points of transformation and how these changes
are reected in the practices and trajectories
of the agents: the way the agents have ori-
ented themselves vis-a-vis new opportunities,
strategic challenges, or simply the increased
structuration of a given eld. Moreover, the
biographies of the players suggest which capital
448 Dezalay Madsen
and resources have been brought into play at
the different stages of structuration.6
It might sound almost like a contradiction
in terms, but this approach of assembling the
collective relational biographies of a given eld
is used as a means to examine the elds struc-
tural transformations, but as documented in
the agents actual practices. Hence, the agents
practices are studied with regard to their ability
to inuence the general structuration process
of the eld. Yet, at the same time, to bridge
micro and macro levels of analysis, this analysis
also explores the ip side of the question
namely, how the general social structures of
the eld are inscribed in the agents practices.
Above all, this empirical usage of agents
trajectories offers a means of decoding the
different struggles that have existed at different
stages of the historical structuration of the eld
(Dezalay & Garth 2002, p. 10). This implies a
certain emphasis of agents over institutions, as
the assumption is that the agents trajectories
provide concrete empirical examples of the dif-
ferent battles related to the buildup of the eld
and its institutions. Put differently, the agents
embody the development of the eld: What
the agents say and how they say it, to an extent,
reveal their position both within and outside
the eld in terms of social class, political af-
liations, etc. However, the method performs
not by individual cases but by assembling a
cumulative story that can be established by
comparing a high number of trajectories within
a particular eld. It thereby provides the intel-
lectual means for constructing an objectively
different account of the eld that is not limited
by the self-representations of institutions,
professions, social movements, etc. Indeed,
rather than taking the legal denitions of, for
example, institutions as the starting point for
their understanding, this approach explores
6
With the term trajectories, we underscore the difference be-
tween our approach, which highlights how individual action
is greatly constrained and informed by the more objective and
structural ordering of elds, and biographic methods, which
tend to place more emphasis on specic actions of individuals
(cf. Bourdieu 1994, pp. 8189).
 LS08CH22-Madsen ARI 28 September 2012 16:5
how legal institutions and practices emerged
on the basis of the legitimacy of collective
entities of agents and their common capital
and ideas within broader constraining social
structures (for an example, see Madsen 2011a).
To identify the dynamics of a eld by,
among other things, mapping it by the means
of its collective and relational biography is, in
practice, an ongoing attempt at sociological
reconstruction and objectivization. Our em-
phasis of structures and relations, as revealed
through the practices of the agents, has turned
out to be particularly useful when analyzing
Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2012.8:433-452. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
elds in which the stakes are very political but
typically presented in very different ways by the
agents, and perhaps notably legal agents. The
by Copenhagen University on 10/30/12. For personal use only.
more or less xed standpoints presented by
agents involved in many forms of human rights
politics are often a real hindrance for a deeper
understanding of the eld. This is exactly
where the outlined methods serve a very clear
purpose in terms of addressing the agents
involvement in and around the particular
subject, as well as in terms of their multiple
identities. By interviewing the agents about
their personal trajectories rather than their
legal or political involvement, the researcher
can assess how they pursue multiple strategies,
even if they often prefer presenting themselves
as associated only with a particular stance. This
form of analysis cannot be based on singular or
individual cases but naturally requires multiple
points of entrance to the eld if the goal is to
challenge the ofcialized discourses, which for
the agents themselves often appear completely
naturalized. Our approach basically provides
for breaking up the discourse into its many
overlapping and even opposing texts and for
identifying its cowriters. This echoes the
very denition of eld, as these conicting by a set of predetermined categories that rest
narratives reect the stakes in the eld and
the agents positions in the eld. The analysis
of the eld is then carried out by examining
the correspondence between the positions (the
agents) and the position-takings (the stakes).
For the same reasons, the approach is not
limited to more politicized spheres of social life
but applies across all elds and agents, literally
ranging from mercenaries of imperialism to
missionaries of the universal (Dezalay 2004).
CONCLUSION
As may already be clear, the approach we out-
line here provides neither empirical nor theo-
retical shortcuts to understanding transnational
elds. Quite on the contrary, it implies a very
substantial number of interviews if the objective
of linking agency and structuration through
qualitative interviews in terms of collective re-
lational biographies is to be fullled. The major
research projects on transnational elds evoked
in this article have all been rather large in scope
and involved between 200 and 400 interviews
conducted in numerous international and
national settings around the world. In addition,
a variety of primary and secondary sources
have been used to inform the interviews and
provide cross-checking of information. This is,
of course, not the only way to apply reexive
sociology in the area of law. Smaller and more
contained objects can also be studied using
these insights (e.g., Hagan & Levi 2005, Parikh
& Garth 2005), and more quantitative methods
can be deployed (e.g., Borjesson & Broady
2006). We would nevertheless maintain that
the greatest impact of Bourdieusian relational
and reexive thinking is generated when it is
deployed to understand complex and dynamic
elds that, for instance, involve national-
international interplays and exchanges.
Transnational legal elds are, as we have
argued, almost by nature complex, dynamic,
and obviously transnational. They simply pose
a methodological and theoretical challenge,
which most conventional sociolegal research
methods fail to meet as they remain constrained
on increasingly inadequate ideas of the national
and international. By its nonessentialist search
for sociological truth, Bourdieusian reexive
sociology seems, on the contrary, uniquely
well suited for conducting such analysis.
Bourdieusian sociology, on a more general
level, also seems particularly appropriate for
conducting sociological studies of law. Indeed,
www.annualreviews.org The Force of Law and Lawyers 449
 LS08CH22-Madsen ARI 28 September 2012 16:5

many of the examples we have introduced by
drawing on our studies of transnational elds
can equally be applied across a range of subjects
in the sociology of law. Because of the pow-
erful sociolinguistic mechanisms of law, any
attempt at sociological inquiry needs to reect
upon how the ofcializing and objectivizing
discourses of law can be challenged. One way
to break with legal discourse and the closely
related powerful positioning of legal agents
that benet from this sociolegal machinery is
through an analysis of the specic historical
geneses of law and power. As we have argued,
Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2012.8:433-452. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
as both an opponent and a protagonist of legal
discourse, we note a particular need for these
measures of sociological reexivity in this area
of study. It is easy to point to how the sociology
of law has occasionally been the victim of a
certain legal bias because of its proximity to
legal discourse. Whether this is a result of
the institutional setup of the sociology of law
vis-a-vis law faculties and law schools or a path
dependence due to the training of sociologists
of law remains in itself a key question for
sociolegal inquiry. Needless to say, to study
the effect of the force of law and lawyers on

this can be accomplished by inquiring into the sociology of law is an object of study that
agendas and games of power as dispositions calls for not only sociological reexivity but
that reect positions of power, politics, social also a sociological framework that has some
by Copenhagen University on 10/30/12. For personal use only.

class, etc. Considering the generally ambiguous of the qualities as the one developed by Pierre
position of the sociology of law in regard to law Bourdieu.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors are not aware of any afliations, memberships, funding, or nancial holdings that
might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

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 LS08-Frontmatter ARI 5 October 2012 12:49

Annual Review of
Law and Social
Science

Contents Volume 8, 2012

Legacies of Legal Realism: The Sociology of Criminal Law and

Criminal Justice
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Eve M. Brank, Lori A. Hoetger, and Katherine P. Hazen p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 213
Pro Se Litigation
Stephan Landsman p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 231

v
 LS08-Frontmatter ARI 5 October 2012 12:49

Regulating Sex Work: Heterogeneity in Legal Strategies

Bill McCarthy, Cecilia Benoit, Mikael Jansson, and Kat Kolar p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 255
History Trials: Can Law Decide History?
Costas Douzinas p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 273
Empirical Studies of Contract
Zev J. Eigen p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 291
Sociolegal Studies on Mexico
Julio Ros-Figueroa p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 307
Mind the Gap: The Place of Gap Studies in Sociolegal Scholarship
Jon B. Gould and Scott Barclay p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 323
Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2012.8:433-452. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

Laws Archive
Renisa Mawani p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 337
by Copenhagen University on 10/30/12. For personal use only.

International Human Rights Law and Social Movements: States

Resistance and Civil Societys Insistence
Kiyoteru Tsutsui, Claire Whitlinger, and Alwyn Lim p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 367
Law and Economics of Intellectual Property: In Search
of First Principles
Dan L. Burk p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 397
Legal History of Money
Roy Kreitner p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 415
The Force of Law and Lawyers: Pierre Bourdieu and the Reexive
Sociology of Law
Yves Dezalay and Mikael Rask Madsen p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 433
Rethinking Corruption in an Age of Ambiguity
Janine R. Wedel p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 453

Indexes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 18 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 499

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 18 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 502

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Law and Social Science articles may be
found at http://lawsocsci.annualreviews.org

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