Legal Professions

According to Pierre Bourdieu’s well-known definition (Bourdieu and
Wacquant, 1992: 105–6), the legal field is a national space whose char-
acteristics are determined by the hierarchies and conflicts that arise
among the actors operating within it, and from the relationships between
it and society at large. As producers, interpreters, administrators and
mediators of the law, European legal practitioners contributed to the
nineteenth-century formation of the national states by guaranteeing legal-
ity and governability in their countries (Trubek et al., 1994: 411). The
eloquence of lawyers helped construct the discourse on the nation
(Beneduce, 1996).