Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002)

Pierre Bourdieu originally studied philosophy at the École normale supérieure in Paris. He went on to pursue a series of empirical studies of vast areas of society, while developing a considerable theoretical apparatus aimed at bridging microand macrolevel social analyses.

Regarded as both a sociologist and an anthropologist, he nevertheless sought throughout his career to go beyond such bounded fields of specialization, as well as the disciplinary classifications shaping them. This objective, which he perceived as implicating both the construction of the research object and the researcher's own role, marks his encounter with law. He placed law, its institutions, and its agents in the broader context of law's interrelationship with social forces other than those immediately at stake only in the microcosm of law. This enabled him, on one hand, to analyze law in the broader social context within which it had been developed and, on the other, to offer a sociology of law that is less law centered or legally biased than mainstream studies of law and society.

Bourdieu was concerned, first, with law as a historical and social construction produced by legal agents and, second, with law as a discourse of power, which is part of the construction of the state as it contributes to its legitimacy. He conducted this analysis by applying his general sociological scheme integrating microand macrosocial practices. The notions of field, habitus, capital, and symbolic power are central to his analysis of law. Despite the interdependence of these concepts, studies in the area of law and society have focused most often on his notion of symbolic capital as a way of explaining the struggles for authority, prestige, knowledge, and reputation that legal agents seek to deploy in their interface with other professions or state agencies.

While this is a central claim in Bourdieu's theory, his contribution to the sociology of law went further. Applying his general approach, Bourdieu analyzed the legal field in its historical process of construction and interaction with other social fields. He was interested in how these shape and impinge on each other. This historical approach allowed him to develop the notion of juridical capital. He defined this concept as the particular form of codified and objectified symbolic capital constructed through interdependent developments of the modern state and the modern legal field. Juridical capital, however, does not refer only to the relative weight of law in a particular society; it also relates to different and complementary types of juridical capital that various legal agents hold. Tied to different positions in the larger field of power, a division of labor expresses itself within the legal field in differentiated sets of mental and social structures, influencing agents in their continuous battle over defining and dividing the terrain of law.