If legal knowledge can generate a sustainable competitive advantage in organizations, then what characteristics of managers and firms best cultivate that knowledge? Given that few managers currently perceive law as a strategic tool, development of a strategy is likely to offer firms an advantage that rivals will be slow to replicate. This chapter highlights two categories of variables. First, the attitudinal perception of managers influences the utilization of legal knowledge through their perceived legitimacy of legal rules, self-efficacy toward legal processes, organizational citizenship, and views of legal experts and the legal process. Second, the attributive characteristics of an organization, such as the presence of a lawyer-CEO, role of legal experts, structure of legal staffing, and regulatory intensity of the legal environment, influence how legal knowledge is deployed. This part concludes that both attitudinal and attributive variables can encourage the acquisition of legal knowledge, which can in turn proliferate the use of legal knowledge as a valuable strategic resource.

This chapter explores whether legal knowledge is not only a valuable resource of a firm, but also a resource that can produce a competitive advantage that’s sustainable against the responses of rivals. This chapter first briefly summarizes the resource-based view of the firm, a prominent management theory used to determine if resources can be leveraged to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. This chapter then shows how legal knowledge and business strategy can operate together to achieve firm goals, and also highlights contributions to scholarly literature on this subject which is generally known as legal strategy. The chapter next inquires whether legal knowledge can be a source of sustainable competitive for organizations. After defining sustainable competitive advantage, the chapter evaluates whether legal knowledge possesses the four traits necessary to support a sustainable competitive advantage – value, rarity, imperfect imitability, and the absence of equivalent substitutes. The chapter concludes that legal knowledge can embody all four traits, and thus be a source of sustainable competitive advantage.

Chapter 3 addresses the suggestion that for a special regime to exist, there must be a mutual engagement of community members. As the chapter argues, in the context of international law, a mutual engagement among a group of international law specialists can be inferred from their participation in a distinct legal discourse, and from their further specialization and distinct way of ascribing functions to legal agents. More specifically, it can be inferred from: the publication of specialized international law journals; the way of organization of conferences and workshops; the creation of inter-governmental organization; the work of NGOs; the specialized research profile of international scholars and description of chairs; their separation of tasks and division of labour; and the function that they ascribe to the judiciary and to the international legal scholar.

The ILC Study Group on Fragmentation of International Law asserted that the proliferation of special regimes poses a threat to the unity of the international legal system. Chapter 6 challenges this assumption. It builds on the distinction made in epistemology between knowledge-that and knowledge-how. The idea of a special regime as a community of practice makes it a system of knowledge-how. As such, it is compatible with all of the legal positivist’s, legal realist’s and legal idealist’s conceptions of an international legal system, which either see it as a system of knowledge-that or a combination of a system of knowledge-that and a system of knowledge-how. In the former case, in no way does the proliferation of special regimes affect the unity of the international legal system. In the latter case, the unity of the international legal system is indeed affected, but only in a positive sense, as it increases the efficacy of international law relative to the assumed legal ideal.

This chapter proposes an inquiry into the surface of EU law. This implies a non-formalist study of legal forms such as legal sentences, concepts and techniques, a rich field of inquiry in itself. These are not mere tools, totally under control, used to achieve certain ends defined in other terms, outside the law. They are far more intriguing and fascinating than that. These legal forms participate to the constitution of legal and social realities that they pretend to regulate. They enable and limit what participants of a language-game can do, and they can even influence what they may want to do. The proposed methodology to study the CJEU implies focusing on law and legal concepts as a set of knowledge practices and inquiries on the transformative power of legal techniques. It should be distinguished from classical studies on the court, mainly dealing with interpretation, as well as from works focusing on power relations between legal actors. Through the presentation of some cases in EU citizenship case law, this chapter focuses on the constitutive dimension of the legal controversy surrounding the Court of Justice of the European Union’s rulings.

Every single lawyer you have ever seen, or heard of, or read about, once sat right where you are sitting now. Every single one of them sat down, for the very first time, pulled open their very first law textbook, took a deep breath and began to learn.