In recent years, international business disputes have increasingly been resolved through private arbitration. The first book of its kind, "Dealing in Virtue" details how an elite group of transnational lawyers constructed an autonomous legal field that has given them a central and powerful role in the global marketplace.
Building on Pierre Bourdieu's structural approach, the authors show how an informal, settlement-oriented system became formalized and litigious. Integral to this new legal field is the intense personal competition among arbitrators to gain a reputation for virtue, hoping...

How does globalization work? Focusing on Latin America, Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth show that exports of expertise and ideals from the United States to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico have played a crucial role in transforming their state forms and economies since World War II.
Based on more than 300 extensive interviews with major players in governments, foundations, law firms, universities, and think tanks, Dezalay and Garth examine both the production of northern exports such as neoliberal economics and international human rights law and the ways they are received south of...

This work examines the on-going efforts of lawyers and allied professionals to construct, police and redefine their respective boundaries. It focuses on the leading corporate practitioners, notably the newly emerging large multinational firms of lawyers and accountants, and on the ways in which they are reshaping the roles and structure of their respective fields. It is these new mega firms of professionals who are playing an increasingly important role in the construction of legal regulation, both national and international.

Drawing on a framework that emphasizes the relationship between the national and the international, the strategies of lawyers at various political levels and the circulation of ideas and people, this volume considers the rule of law as a field of action and discourse that emerges through complex relationships.

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...