Isaiah's Dream: Making European Law and Lawyers European in the Twentieth Century

The practice of law is undoubtedly a major factor providing for stability and continuity within societies. The question as to what extent international law performs similar functions for building and maintaining durable supranational structures has in recent years attracted multidisciplinary attention, especially with regard to the process of European integration.  Yet, surprisingly little attention has so far been paid to the group of lawyers and judges who shaped the integration process in national governments, European institutions and the courts.

This paper adopts a Bourdieusian perspective on the development of international/European law in the twentieth century, arguing that the field was able to overcome world wars and financial crises due to lawyers’ transnational interconnections and accumulation of social, cultural and economic resources on behalf of the field. The paper utilizes i.a. affiliation data documenting the careers of several hundred international lawyers since 1900: from early student activism for internationalist causes through academic and government service to appointments to the European Commission or the European Court of Justice. This material will be analyzed to ascertain the structural outlines of the field: Which practices came to define a European lawyer? Who were the main stakeholders?

The paper ultimately points to a common ancestry of activism for a European legal order and for controversial investor-state arbitration mechanisms: both approaches are heirs to a social movement that sought to defuse and depoliticize conflicts by appointing lawyers to navigate the frontier between national sovereignty and interdependence.