Lawyers and the Construction of Transnational Justice will show students and scholars what it means in practice to talk about building transnational justice -- both on the side of economic regulation and on the side of human rights and humanitarian law. It links national and transnational processes, tracing the activities of lawyers with their successful and less successful strategies to build institutions and credibility for a transnational legal field. Examples include developments in international criminal justice, including the unsuccessful quest to establish universal jurisdiction for the prosecution of human rights violators; the very successful efforts to build transnational trade and intellectual property regimes; and the relative success in building a European legal field. The introductory and concluding chapters by the co-editors, drawing on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, link the chapters together and explore the possibilities for a more institutionalized and unified transnational legal field -- bridging the economic and corporate side with the human rights and humanitarian side.
Addressing a range of international issues, Lawyers and the Construction of Transnational Justice is a major contribution to the field of sociology of law, as well as to debates about global governance.