Making it Work: Law’s Agency in Global Governance

Inspired by the work of Annelise Riles, this article invites legal scholars to ‘take on the legal technicalities’ of globalisation. Law and lawyers have a core role in the conception, the construction and the functioning of global regulatory settings. However, the study of legal technicalities has been overlooked, both by the theoretically-minded literature on law beyond the state and by those studying the actual workings of global governance. We argue that legal technique is too interesting to be reduced to a consequence of wider globalising trends or to a simple instrument of technocratic governance. The study of law as technique can offer insights into how law constitutes social, political or economic phenomena. This kind of self-consciousness and self-reflection is crucial in legal scholarship especially today, as it is a necessary step for opening the way to transformative politics in the field of global governance and beyond