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The World Bank's Lawyers: The Life of International Law as Institutional Practice de Dimitri Van Den Meerssche

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

Autor Dimitri Van Den Meerssche
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 7 oct 2022
The World Bank's Lawyers provides an original socio-legal account of the evolving institutional life of international law. Informed by oral archives, months of participant observation, interviews, legal memoranda, and documents obtained through freedom-of-information requests, it tells a previously untold story of the World Bank's legal department between 1983 and 2016. 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, this 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 in law's shifting mode of existence. This history of international law as a 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.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780192846495
ISBN-10: 0192846493
Pagini: 336
Dimensiuni: 162 x 241 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.63 kg
Editura: OUP OXFORD
Colecția OUP Oxford
Seria The History and Theory of International Law

Locul publicării:Oxford, United Kingdom

Recenzii

Opens the black box of international institutional law and apply sociological as well as anthropological methods to study the people, spaces, and processes that create international law.
One of the best and most perceptive studies of the role of the legal advisor in international law yet produced, persuasively argued and beautifully written.
Dimitri Van Den Meerssche successfully disentangles governance practices in the World Bank in his recently published book The World Bank's Lawyers. It is a masterful study, rich in terms of method, inquiry, insights, and intellectual engagement.
The World Bank's Lawyers: The Life of International Law as Institutional Practice offers illuminating insights into the legal life of the bank as led by four consecutive legal counsels from the early 1980s through 2016, their converging and diverging ways of lawyering in the face of crises, changing ideologies, and opposing visions.
The World Bank has become an avatar for global power or powerlessness in so many different contexts that it is hard to believe that anything new could be written about it. It is all the more wondrous, then, that The World Bank's Lawyers has such freshness—that the story of "an office space on the 6th and 7th floors of a building symbolizing post-war international economic order" could be so enthralling. Drawing on ANT, institutional ethnography, and international law scholarship, Van Den Meerssche sheds fascinating new light on how legal experts crafted, sustained, and remade notions of the "rule of law" since the end of the Cold War. Just as importantly, it provides a close and surprisingly moving study of the efforts of successive generations of privileged people to try to figure out how to live in, with, through and despite their laws.
Famously, over the past decades, international legal scholarship experienced several turns. There's been a 'theory turn', 'practice turn', 'empirical turn', for example, and, of course, a 'turn to history'. In The World Bank's Lawyers, Van Den Meerssche performs all these turns and more with mastery, eloquence and unique fluency. Borrowing with ease from theoretical and methodological debates across law and social sciences, with a keen eye for unexplored sources, and a stanch commitment to describing what lies behind -and beneath- the World Bank's endorsement of 'the rule of law', his analysis debunks traditional assumptions about the Bank's long and tense affair with law, legality and lawyers. The Bank, an institution committed to transparency and yet one that remains stubbornly a black box, is laid bare -along with its General Counsel- as never before.
If law offers the language in which political and economic conversations are conducted, it stands to reason that students of IO law familiarize themselves with the discipline's formal grammar, encapsulated in abstract terms as 'implied powers', 'functional necessity', or 'rule of law'. Yet, as Van Den Meerssche shows in this path-breaking study, there is much to be gained from studying the way this language is used on a daily basis in an institution as the World Bank. Inspired by the likes of Latour and, in some ways, current passions for empirical legal studies, and informed by a firm command of legal tradition and doctrine, Van den Meerssche offers a beautifully composed and elegantly written dissection of the law in action in the World Bank. The World Bank's Lawyers is compulsory reading for everyone interested in international organizations law.
If the title "The World Bank's Lawyers" makes you think boredom squared, think again. This is one of the liveliest accounts of international law I have ever come across.
I find myself reading Dimitri Van Den Meerssche's book The World Bank's Lawyers with admiration…Van Den Meerssche's exposes those moments in the practice of General Counsels in a skillful and original way that is exemplary for the power of description we should indeed praise.

Notă biografică

Dimitri Van Den Meerssche is a Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences and Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary University of London. He holds a PhD degree from the EUI and master degrees from NYU School of Law and Ghent University (summa cum laude). His work draws on socio-legal methods to study the law of international organizations and, more recently, the ways in which big data and AI are reshaping global security governance. Dimitri has widely published and taught in different areas of international law. He is a founding committee member of the ESIL Interest Group on International Law and Technology