Rules, lawyering and the politics of legality: Critical sociology and international law's rule

This 11, 252 word article was published by a top international journal: the Leiden Journal of International Law. This article questions a presumption in legal theory that the performance of the “rule of law” is tied to courts and judges. I argue that lawyering is in fact central to the “rule of law”, and substantiate that claim theoretically by providing a socialization of Kant’s famous “ruler applier” via the works of Bourdieu and Foucault. The second part of the paper advances an empirical claim on the rising salience of international lawyers to scrutinize how advanced armies are “lawyering up” to reduce the applicable scope of the Geneva Conventions.