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The World Bank's Lawyers: The Life of International Law as Institutional Practice

The World Bank's Lawyers: The Life of International Law as Institutional Practice

Author: Dimitri van den Meerssche
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780192846495
Published In: October 2022
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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Contents

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The World Bank's Lawyers gives an original socio-legal account of the evolving institutional life of international law from liberalism to managerialism. Informed by months of participant observation, dozens of interviews, oral archives, informal memoranda, and documents obtained through freedom-of-information requests. It tells a previously untold story of the World Bank's legal department. This is a story of people and the beliefs they have, the influence they seek and the tools they employ. It is an account of the practices they cling to and how these practices gain traction, or how they fail to do so, in an international bureaucracy.

Inspired by actor-network theory, relational sociologies of association, and performativity theory, this ethnographic exploration multiplies the matters of concern in our study of international law (and lawyering): the human and non-human, material and semantic, visible and evasive actants that tie together the fragile fabric of legality. In tracing these threads, the book signals important changes in the conceptual repertoire and materiality of international legal practice, as liberal ideals were gradually displaced by managerial modes of evaluation. It reveals a world teeming with life - a space where professional postures and prototypes, aesthetic styles, and technical routines are woven together into law's shifting mode of existence. This history of international law as contingent cultural technique enriches our understanding of the discipline's disenchantment and the displacement of its traditional tropes by unexpected and unruly actors. It thereby inspires new ways of critical thinking about international law's political pathways, promises, and pathologies, as its language is inscribed in ever-evolving rationalities of rule.

1:Introduction: The Life of International Law - On People, Practices, and Performances

Part I: Ibrahim Shihata - The Performative Power of Liberal Legalism

2:The 'Force of Law' Under Construction - Sensibility, Authority, Performativity

3:The 'Force of Law' Performed - The Institutional Politics of Legal Practice

Part II: Roberto Dañino - Cosmopolitanism and the Culture of the 'How to' Lawyer

4:Law's Metamorphosis - Rupture, Reconstruction, and Recollection

5:'Of course we are bound by those' - Dañino's Human Rights Agenda

Part III: Anne-Marie Leroy - The General Counsel as 'High-Level Administrator'

6:Law as Management - An Agenda of Cultural Change

7:'A new normative architecture' - Risk, Resilience and Deformalization

8:Conclusion: Assembling the Actants of International Law