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Looking back 25 years after the publication of Pierre Bourdieu's seminal article “The Force of Law,” we inquire into the background for the weak reception of his work in law and society studies. We argue that the differences in the conceptions of law, state, and society between US law and society scholarship and French historical sociology have made it hard to transfer the theory across the Atlantic. We further contend that the impact of Bourdieu's work has generally been reduced by how it has been perceived as yet another French theory. It has thus been decoupled from perhaps its greatest strength, namely, the underlying notion of sociology as a reflexive practice. Against this background, this article sets out to reconnect the practice of Bourdieusian sociology with its conceptual framework and, in so doing, demonstrate its potentially central role in the sociology of law.

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.

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