This article proposes a new approach to the study of job satisfaction in the legal profession. Drawing on a Bourdieusian understanding of the relationship between social class and dispositions, we argue that job satisfaction depends in part on social origins and the credentials related to these origins, with social hierarchies helping to define the expectations and possibilities that produce professional careers. Through this lens, job satisfaction is understood as a mechanism through which social and professional hierarchies are produced and reproduced. Relying on the first national data set on lawyer careers (including both survey data and in‐depth interviews), we find that lawyers' social background, as reflected in the ranking of their law school, decreases career satisfaction and increases the odds of a job search for the most successful new lawyers. When combined with the interview data, we find that social class is an important component of a stratification system that tends to lead individuals into hierarchically arranged positions.

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This article tells the story of the establishment of the Law and Society Association in the early to mid-1960s. To tell the story, the authors concentrate on the personal stories of the individuals active in that early period and on four university campus sites—the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Denver, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin—at which much of the impetus was focused. They also examine key institutions that funded and/or encouraged links between law and social science—the Russell Sage Foundation, the Walter E. Meyer Research Institute of Law, and the American Bar Foundation. The article seeks also to investigate more generally the factors that came together to build a field of law and social science—which in turn helped to provide the ideas and build the institutions involved in the Johnson administration's War on Poverty. The field was created in part by a process involving both competition and cooperation between law and social science over the new terrain of social problems of racial discrimination, poverty, and crime. The authors suggest that, over time, the center of gravity of the field moved toward law, leaving the social science disciplines for the most part outside. The development of the field generally was also affected by the strong shift in the relative values of these social sciences—especially sociology—in relation to economics in the 1980s.

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.”

▪ Abstract  This review explores the creation and transformation of the field of international human rights in the period after World War II. The narrative proceeds through an examination, based on documentary evidence and interviews, of three generations of human rights nongovernmental organizations: the International Commission of Jurists, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. Each was created in part to overcome the limitations of the previous generation, and the process, linked to developments in the U.S. field of state power and U.S. activities abroad—especially in Latin America—gradually produced a field with substantial legal autonomy. At the same time, however, the structure of the field moved increasingly close to U.S. power and the issues and strategies that would gain credibility in the United States. The autonomy is therefore structurally close to U.S. power.