As someone who was privileged to call Laurie B. Edelman a mentor and also a friend, I write this short essay to highlight the international diffusion of her research and in particular, the important legacy she has left to French scholarship on law and society. Laurie certainly preferred Italy, Bellagio, and Lake Como notably, but she did not hate Paris either, and she traveled here several times for academic events. Beyond this, however, her work has been very influential for many young French researchers in recent years. As an actor facilitating the diffusion and discussion of Laurie's work in France, I want to pay tribute to her by describing how the legal endogeneity theory that she gradually forged based mostly on her work in employment discrimination law has been understood by French sociologists, institutionalist economists and political scientists over the last 20 years. In the remainder of this essay, I first point to some milestones in the attention to and diffusion of her work in France. These include theses, invitations to colloquia, and the publication of books and special issues of journals. Second, I evoke various publications and how they have been further mobilized in French law and society scholarship. Third, I point to two main avenues of thought that have been opened up so far.
SOME MILESTONES OF LAURIE'S IMPORT IN FRANCEThe central journal of the sociology of law in France, Droit et société, and its associated publications, were important vehicles for the dissemination of Laurie's work in France at the turn of the 2010s. The journal published a special issue in 2011 (Pélisse, 2011 "Giving Oneself Rights: The Strength of Organizations vis-à-vis the Law") 1 and the same year saw publication of a book, Droit et régulations des activités économiques. Perspectives sociologiques et institutionnalistes in the collection « Droit et société » of the legal publisher LGDJ. 2 These two projects stem from the same colloquium, which I initiated with the help of Christian Bessy (an institutionalist economist) and Thierry Delpeuch (a political scientist), and held in 2008 at the Ecole normale supérieure de Cachan, near Paris. In 2003, I discovered the theory of legal endogeneity by reading a draft Laurie wrote for the Law and Society meetings that was available on the internet. I was completely unfamiliar with Laurie's work at that time, but 2 years earlier, I discovered the work of the American Law and Society movement by reading two famous books (Susan Silbey and Patty Ewick's The Common Place of Law, 1998 and Michael McCann's Rights at Work, 1994) which, along with Laurie's Working Law (2016) make up my personal pantheon of the best socio-legal books that I ever read. The theory I discovered in the 2003 draft strongly inspired me. Even better, it gave me the key and the plan to the manuscript of the doctoral thesis that I was beginning to write. I contacted Laurie in 2007 because I wanted to organize a symposium in France so that her work could be more known to French scholars. Laurie agreed immediately...