World Bank's Lawyers

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 thetools 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 thematters 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 ourunderstanding 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 ofrule.

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.

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 widelypublished and taught in different areas of international law. He is a founding committee member of the ESIL Interest Group on International Law and Technology