A whole generation has now grown up with “globalization” as essential part of the vocabulary, but in the 1980s Law and Society scholars could only see important developments in the legal world in terms of an older set of concepts and questions. At the time that Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth began thinking about the mysterious world of international commercial arbitration, they had a study in “dispute resolution” and domestic courts. When they had finished, they had a book that was praised as a study in globalization and a window into an emerging global legal field.

At a time when social and political theorists had only begun debating the nature and meaning of globalization, the social scientific study of international commercial arbitration presented new challenges along with the old. Prosaically, top-drawer commercial arbitration is an exclusive club, and they would expect to encounter the sensitivities that accompany research among most elite. Also, this legal realm is among the more complex and obscure. How could one cut through the impenetrable to see the emerging field in a different light? Add to that, now that this emerging legal field served global corporate enterprises, and one might ask where do you begin and where should you end? Dealing in Virtue, in the end, examines activity as far reaching as Egypt and Hong Kong, among other places.

At first glance, Dezalay and Garth might have seemed unlikely partners to take on such a project: Garth, an American law professor comfortable with the button-down collar set, and Dezalay, a French sociologist with a verve for critical theory.