Introduction: The Microfoundations of Legal Intermediation in Organizational Contexts

Abstract

Law, public policy, and economic activity are intimately tied to each other. State policies and the legal system have often worked in favor of private economic interests. For instance, core features of the United States (US) legal system of the 19 th century were designed to protect the interests of the capitalist class (Horwitz 1992). Nowadays, narrow definitions of responsibility and privileged access to formal legal institutions still help the "haves" to "come out ahead" (Galanter 1974;Sutton 2001). Conversely, law has also been used (successfully or not) to coerce economic interests. Due to rules governing industrial relations and giving workers more power vis-à-vis their employers, corporations have become "legalized" settings (Selznick, 1969), where labor unions have gained leverage to shape workers' rights and accommodations (

From international law to subnational practices: How intermediaries translate the Istanbul Convention

“…A second body of literature on intermediaries in the field of law and society, more precisely in the new legal realist movement, is also of interest for our research because it underlines intermediaries' roles in transnational processes (Shaffer, 2012) and focuses on how international norms are used, appropriated, and translated into local contexts (Merry, 2006a(Merry, , 2006b as well as on the contingent and processual aspects of legal intermediation (Billows et al, 2019). Although these scholars applaud the increasing examination of regulatory intermediaries, they criticize this latter approach for still being a top-down and law-first approach (Gray & Pélisse, 2019) (see also Thomann, 2015 for a similar critique of the literature on European Union implementation).…”

“…This theory has shown that regulation must be studied as a three (or more)-party relationship between a regulator, an intermediary, and a target (RIT model). Our study fruitfully combines this "topdown" theoretical conceptualization with "bottom-up" approaches geared toward the translation and local uses of HR law (Merry, 2006a(Merry, , 2006bMerry et al, 2010) and legal intermediation processes (Billows et al, 2019) through which "legal rules are interpreted, implemented or constructed once they are passed by public legal institutions" (Talesh & Pélisse, 2019, p. 113). Building on these two streams of literature, we consider intermediation a process in which intermediaries ensure the interlinkage between regulators and regulatory targets by drawing on their capabilities, authority, and legitimacy (Abbott et al, 2017c) and making use of their leeway in shaping the regulatory process.…”

The role of legal intermediaries in the dispute pyramid: inequalities before the French legal system

“…Concerning the role of legal intermediaries, it seems useful to recall that socio-legal scholars have created this concept of 'legal intermediaries' to designate actorslawyers or non-legal professionalswho assist ordinary people in transforming their grievance into an appeal to the courts (Sarat and Felstiner, 1989;Kritzer, 1990;Spire and Weidenfeld, 2011;Lejeune and Orianne, 2014;Billows et al, 2019;Pélisse, 2019;Talesh and Pélisse, 2019). A new field of research has emerged that studies the wide range of people who, although they are not legal professionals, perform the function, roles and activities of legal intermediariesfor example, insurers (Talesh, 2015), safety engineers in research laboratories (Pélisse, 2017) or union delegates (Guillaume, 2018b).…”

“…However, we argue that this scholarship has not paid close enough attention to two dimensions: first, how the dispute pyramid differs depending on a set of social characteristics of the plaintiffs involved in these conflicts and, second, what factors increase or reduce inequalities among plaintiffs when they raise disputes and, in particular, the role played by legal intermediaries, who are primarily legal professionals (lawyers, notaries, legal advisers), but can also be non-legal professionals (trade unionists, association activists, work colleagues, etc.) (Billows et al, 2019).…”

Laurie in Paris. Diffusion, discussion and influences of Lauren Edelman's work in France

“…Contracts (in the tradition of a famous article by Mark Suchman (2003), who worked closely with Laurie), also must be taken into account to understand legal endogeneity process, like management software or other standardization documents. Two articles, one by Sebastian Billows (2019) and the other by Alina Surubaru (2019) that appeared in 2019 Studies in Law, Politics and Society -the special issue edited by Billows, Buchter and Pélisse (2019) -are devoted to the ways these other material objects and devices figure into legal intermediation.…”