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CAIRO BOOKS's Description
In this book, Bruno Latour pursues his ethnographic inquiries into the
different value systems of modern societies. After science, technology,
religion, art, it is now law that is being studied by using the same
comparative ethnographic methods. The case study is the daily practice of one
of the French supreme court, the Conseil d’Etat, specialized in administrative
law (the equivalent of the Law Lords in Great Britain). Even though the French
legal system is vastly different from the Anglo-American tradition, it just
happens that this branch of French law, although created by Napoleon Bonaparte
at the same time as the Code-based system, is the result of a home grown
tradition constructed on precedents. Thus, even though highly technical, the
cases that forms the matter of this book, are not so exotic for an English
speaking audience.
What makes this study an important contribution to the social studies of law
is that, because of an unprecedented access to the collective discussions of
judges, Latour has been able to reconstruct in details the weaving of legal
reasoning : it is clearly not the social that explains the law, but the legal
ties that alter what it is to be associated together. It is thus a major
contribution to Latour’s social theory since it is now possible to compare the
ways legal ties build up associations with the other types of connections that
he has studied in other fields of acticity. His project of an alternative
interpretation of the very notion of society has never been made clearer than
in this work. To reuse the title of his first book, this book is in effect the
Laboratory Life of Law.