Bryant G. Garth

Law, Lawyers and Social Capital: "Rule of Law' Versus Relational Capitalism

ture promoting this role, especially articles in the new trade press which help to construct the brand names and images of the great business law firms. Nevertheless, the degree or even the reality of these transformations remain difficult to assess. The problem of assessment results in part from the difficulty of measuring this kind of phenomenon objectively, but even more from the defects in our conceptual and theoretical tools. Empirical work on law and business is often characterized by an ’orientalism’ (Greenhalgh, 1994) that closely resembles its opposite, ethnocentrism. Work from within the legal academy tends to focus only on ’legal rationality’ and formal law. Economists and sociologists who study business may pay attention to law,

A dolarização do conhecimento técnico profissional e do Estado: processos transnacionais e questões de legitimação na transformação do Estado, 1960-2000

O artigo tem por objetivo analisar a crescente importância dos tecnico-politicos no comando de posicoes-chave de poder em paises latino-americanos. Esses profissionais, que combinam conhecimento tecnico especializado com sensibilidade politica, tem suas carreiras construidas em mercados internacionais de conhecimento tecnico centrados nos Estados Unidos. As suas trajetorias profissionais conectam e desconectam os campos profissionais nacionais, de acordo com as conjunturas especificas e as estruturas locais herdadas, em uma dinâmica de importantes consequencias para o desenvolvimento de cada pais em particular. O artigo analisa esse processo mediante o detalhamento das transformacoes ocorridas recentemente em tres campos profissionais: a economia, a advocacia de negocios e a advocacia de interesse publico.

Power and Legal Artifice: The Federal Class Action

Using case studies and interviews with lawyers and representatives in class actions, this article explores the contribution that class actions make to their ostensible beneficiaries. The article first distinguishes the major types of class actions in terms of the roles of lawyers and class representatives, ranging from very passive representatives to individuals intensively involved with the dispute that gave rise to the litigation. The article next seeks to evaluate the class actions. On the basis of the results of the class actions, the article finds that class actions cannot be proclaimed major contributors to social change. The focus on results, however, is somewhat misleading. The class action plays a much more significant role through its impact on the parties as litigants and as individuals involved with a dispute. To understand this dimension, which has applications beyond the class action, the article suggests that the dispute transformation perspective should be modified to go beyond the metaphor of a dispute that changes form as it goes through different processes. Disputants in the class action can be thought of as an audience that interprets itself-and is empowered or disempowered-in part by what it learns from watching a legal dramatization of the dispute.

James Willard Hurst as Entrepreneur for the Field of Law and Social Science

Celebrations of the career of Willard Hurst tend to concentrate, quite understandably, on his scholarship in legal history. Most of those who now read and comment on his works are professional legal historians, and they tend to read and define Hurst according to that professional identification. This article takes a different approach, concentrating on Hursts own role in the more general politics of legal scholarship. Hurst was not content with making a mark in legal history. He sought to challenge the legal establishment. We see the legacy of his efforts in the development of the field of law and social science, institutionalized in the mid 1960s in the Law and Society Association (LSA). Therefore, my focus is on the sociology and politics of scholarship rather than on intellectual history. I will not examine the relationship of Hursts particular works to those who came before or after him, nor will I go through the exercise of suggesting what was good or lasting or useful about his work for present purposes. Rather than examining what Hurst happened to read or which scholars evidently influenced him, I will explore what we might learn by treating Hurst as an ambitious actor trying to make his way in the field of law. The assumption of this exercise is that Hurst followed a strategy constrained by his own resources and relative position (in Bourdieus terms, his social and symbolic capital) in relation to those of his competitors and by his own understanding of what defined success as a legal actor. The intellectual stance that he developed was a product of his imagination, what he happened to read, and who he happened to know, but he was also embedded in a field that shaped what opportunities appeared to be available to him. That is not to say that he necessarily chose positions calculated to make him famous or successful. What I mean by his strategy was that he sought

State Politics and Legal Markets

The paper begins by exploring literature on the legal profession that tends to obscure questions at the heart of our research. It then turns to our approach, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, which looks beyond the category of profession as such to the social space in which professions are situated. The key from our perspective is to examine both the social interests embedded in law and lawyers and the specific interests of learned professionals themselves. This perspective leads not to criticism or praise of lawyers, but rather to an understanding of how elite lawyers participate in the construction of the state and economy. We examine relationships between three poles ‐ knowledge, state politics, and power, whether economic or social ‐ that contribute to shaping the legal profession.

Comment: A Revival of Access-to-Justice Research

Access to justice is both a topic of engaged social-legal research and a key component of legal professional ideology. There is a relationship between the two. The more committed the organized legal profession to the issue of access to justice, the higher the profile of scholarly research on topics that relate in one form or another to access to justice. The organized bars commitment peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, waned in the 1980s, and has not regained the position it once had on the domestic U.S. agenda. In contrast, however, access to justice has recently emerged strongly on the reform agenda that U.S. and multilateral foreign aid organizations – along with the U.S. legal profession – are promoting abroad as part of the renewed post Cold War effort to build the rule of law.

Constructing Virtual Justice in the Global Arena@@@Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order

In recent years, international business disputes have increasingly been resolved through private arbitration. This book details how an elite group of transnational lawyers constructed an autonomous legal field that has given them a central and powerful role in the global marketplace. Building on Pierre Bourdieus structural approach, this book shows how an informal, settlement-oriented system became formalized and litigious. Using mulitple examples, the book explores how international developmetns can transform domestic methods for handling disputes and analyzes the changing prospects for international business dispute resolution given the growin presence of such international market and regulatory institutions as the EEC, WTO and NAFTA.

Some Realism About Realism in Teaching About the Legal Profession

UC Irvine Law School has adopted a first-year course designed to introduce students to the rich empirical literature on the legal profession and to give them an understanding of practice realities and critical perspectives on those practices. It also seeks to provide students with information about the social and cultural contexts of law practice that they will find useful as they navigate their careers. This chapter describes and assesses the course and our experience while teaching it.

Law and Society: Development of the Field

The article discusses the origins of the field of law and society (also called sociolegal studies), especially in the United States; relates it to ‘legal realism’ and to competition and cooperation between the fields of law and sociology; explores the symbiotic relationship of the field to the social welfare state; and then explains its more hostile relationship to the neoliberal state. The field grew very quickly in the 1960s in relation to the activist state, declined in relation to law and economics and the neoliberal state, and then has prospered again through globalization and the rise of interdisciplinary studies in law schools.