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Merchants of Law as Moral Entrepreneurs: Constructing International Justice from the Competition for Transnational Business Disputes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Yves Dezalay  and
Bryant Garth
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Abstract

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Over the past 20 years, international commercial arbitration has been transformed and institutionalized as the leading contractual method for the resolution of transnational commercial disputes. It has become an important institution of the growing international market. Although the process is far from unidirectional, this work of social construction can be described as a rationalization in the Weberian sense and also as an “Americanization” that has permitted U.S. litigators to shape the rules to favor their adversarial skills and approaches. An informal justice system has come increasingly to resemble “offshore litigation.”

Drawing on Bourdieu's analytical tool of the legal “field” and, in particular, using the notion of an “international legal field,” this case study reveals how the continuing competition for business and for legitimacy—between civil law and common law, “grand old men” and “technocrats,” academics and practitioners—constructs and transforms the system of (international private) justice. As is true generally with respect to law, the details of the competition serve to build the careers of practitioners, to develop the area of practice, and to produce and legitimate the relevant “law.”

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , 1995 , pp. 27 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

This research was supported by a substantial grant from the National Science Foundation (Grant No. SES-9024498) and generous support from the American Bar Foundation. We also received a small but helpful grant from the Phillips Foundation. We have benefited considerably from the research assistance of Carole Silver and also from the research help of Tiffany Davis and Rhonda Mundhenk. Among the very helpful commentators on earlier versions were John Comaroff, Beth Mertz, and Nancy Reichman.

We have cited numerous interviews here. The respondents to our interviews have been numbered, and the citations (e.g., “Int. 85:17”) are to the numbered interview and the page number in that transcript.

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