Les professionnels du droit comme acteurs du politique : revue critique de la littérature nord-américaine et enjeux pour une importation en Europe continentale

For many years, North-American social sciences have been analyzing legal professionals as political actors, while in Continental Europe the relationship among law, politics, and society has remained under-examined. At the moment, a central project for US sociolegal studies is exporting to other political and legal contexts hypotheses previously tested inside US borders, raising the question of the generalizability and/or the globalization of US socio-legal analyses. After briefly describing why social sciences have been focusing on law and social changes in the United States, this article aims to determine what prerequisites are necessary for exporting sociolegal studies outside the US, devoting particular attention to historically contingent —and nationally-distinct— relations between law, political power and the social sciences.