The Force of Law: research routes in sociology of the juridical field

Abstract

The contributions of Pierre Bourdieu oeuvre to the analysis of the legal field do not seem to reverberate properly within the confines of the legal sciences, despite the existence of an already consolidated academic production, made from the theoretical framework of a Bourdieusian relational sociology that has the legal act as an object of investigation. Indeed, jurists and the legal field were objects of ancillary considerations at various times in the author’s work, but it was in The Force of Law that Pierre Bourdieu traced a kind of general sociological approach of the current theories of law. Our hypothesis is (i) that this seminal essay should be read more as a research script, capable of raising doubts and hypotheses that can be verified or refuted, than a repository of ready-made answers about the power relations within the legal field and (ii) that its proper reception by the legal sciences in Brazil would be able to help unveiling the strongly genetic conservative character of the national legal field. To verify our hypothesis we will firstly reconstruct the author’s main arguments, (a) about the necessity of the emergence of a rigorous science of law, (b) about the divisions and internal disputes within the field as a condition of mystification of the legal discourse and (c) its comprehension about the performatives powers of legal acts. These fundamental debates, as a rule, are absent from national legal formation or are extremely marginalized, what ends contributing to the preservation of a hegemony of traditional theories of law – these theories have in common the fact that they blur the political, economic and cultural disputes that underlie legal production and application.