The articles by Carruthers and Halliday and by Hagan, Levi, and Ferrales in the present issue of Law and Social Inquiry provide a wonderful opportunity to carry out a brief reflection on the broader field of research on globalization and law. As the discussant and organizer/chair, respectively, of a panel on “Law between Globalization and National Institutions,” from which these two articles emerged, we use the following pages to: (1) show how both articles exemplify, in two different ways, what we call the “process turn” in globalization research, (2) identify four theoretical themes these articles speak to, relating them to the broader literature, and (3) draw some lessons for future law and society scholarship in an age of globalization.1

This article draws from a larger research project on the globalization of bankruptcy law that includes (1) a time-series analysis of all bankruptcy reforms worldwide from 1973 to 1998; (2) participation observation, several hundred interviews and documentary analysis of international financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development), international professional associations (International Bar Association, International Federation of Insolvency Practitioners), and world governance organizations (OECD, U.N. Commission on International Trade Law); and (3) case studies of Indonesia, Korea, and China.

The globalization of law is a negotiated process. Our research on international organizations and case studies of China, Indonesia, and South Korea indicates that negotiation of the global/local relationship varies by the vulnerability of a country to global forces. Nation-states vary (1) in their balance of power vis-à-vis global actors; and (2) in their social and cultural distance from the global. Yet even where the global/local gap is wide and the asymmetry of power is pronounced, local responses to global pressures are negotiated as much as imposed. Negotiating globalization relies on direct and mediated interactions by several types of intermediaries who translate global scripts into four kinds of outcomes. The impact of intermediaries in this process varies by the phase of the reform in which they participate. Finally, globalizing law proceeds through recursive cycles of lawmaking and law implementation.

This article develops a conflict approach for studying the field of international criminal law. Focusing on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, we draw on Burawoy's (2003) elaboration of reflexive ethnography to determine how external political changes affect the work of an international legal institution. We explore how political frameworks of legal liberalism, ad hoc legalism, and legal exceptionalism result in internal office, organizational, and normative changes within this Tribunal, thereby linking national political transformations with the construction of the global. Drawing on rolling field interviews and a two-wave panel survey, we conclude that the claims to universals that underwrite transnational legal fields cannot be understood solely through an analysis of external political forces, but must be combined with attention to how these are refracted through internal organizational change within international institutions.

Compared to the practice in other professional schools and academic fields at universities, law professors are hired at a young age based primarily upon their academic merit determined through grades, class rank, and school rank. This emphasis upon narrowly defined academic merit—apart from achievement demonstrated through original scholarship or experience in professional practice—first emerged during “the professionalization of the American law professor” between 1870 and 1900 at Harvard Law School (HLS). Though normative today, this outcome was neither necessary nor uncontested. In the late nineteenth century the new standard of hiring faculty according to their academic merit was energetically opposed by those favoring the antecedent standard of professional experience and reputation. Only when financial considerations counterbalanced that traditional standard did hiring decisions tip in favor of the new principle. Not until the early 1900s, when the second generation of academic meritocrats dominated the HLS faculty, did the new hiring standard become unequivocally established as policy in the school and, by extension, in legal education.

Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler, we develop a detailed ethnography of a social space in a major law school and explore its socialization of the students there. “Coffee House” is a weekly social event sponsored by Canadian law firms and offering free drink and food to the students present. We argue that this event and the actors involved profoundly change student identities and alter educational aspirations. Although the students themselves insist that “nothing is going on,” our ethnography suggests that in “Coffee House” identity is developed through performances, and in the accumulation of symbolic capital, until ultimately students come to feel their future career path is not a matter of choice, but destiny. We explore the important work of Bourdieu through this setting, but ultimately we resist his determinism, and suggest instead that, following the work of Butler, identity is a more complicated and fluid dynamic between space, repetition, and performance. It appears that a personal unconscious transformation among law students attending Coffee House is underway; yet opportunities to change the meaning of this space and these performances remain.

It is frequently suggested that law school debt is preventing new law school graduates from entering public service careers. The basis for this contention is largely anecdotal, however. This study puts the presumption to empirical scrutiny. Aggregate data from law schools and individual-level data from law students both point to the same conclusion: law students may indeed be competing in a money chase, but it is not because of their indebtedness. Private firms with prestige and high salaries are appealing to many students regardless of their debt burden. And government and public interest jobs may be in too short supply to meet the demand of non-elite students who are essentially closed out of the high-paying jobs in larger firms. The biggest barrier between these students and public service jobs may be the lack of supply of these jobs, not the lack of demand for them.