The World Bank's Lawyers

Opens the black box of international institutional law and apply sociological as well as anthropological methods to study the people, spaces, and processes that create international law. * Silvia Steininger, Helga Molbæk-Steensig, European Journal of International Law *
One of the best and most perceptive studies of the role of the legal advisor in international law yet produced, persuasively argued and beautifully written. * William E. Butler, Jus Gentium *
Dimitri Van Den Meerssche successfully disentangles governance practices in the World Bank in his recently published book The World Bank's Lawyers. It is a masterful study, rich in terms of method, inquiry, insights, and intellectual engagement. * Gail Lythgoe, Teaches and researches international law and global governance and is co-director of the Manchester International Law Centre, Voelkerrechtsblog *
The World Bank's Lawyers: The Life of International Law as Institutional Practice offers illuminating insights into the legal life of the bank as led by four consecutive legal counsels from the early 1980s through 2016, their converging and diverging ways of lawyering in the face of crises, changing ideologies, and opposing visions. * Negar Mansouri, PhD candidate in international law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies., Voelkerrechtsblog *
The World Bank has become an avatar for global power or powerlessness in so many different contexts that it is hard to believe that anything new could be written about it. It is all the more wondrous, then, that The World Bank's Lawyers has such freshness—that the story of "an office space on the 6th and 7th floors of a building symbolizing post-war international economic order" could be so enthralling. Drawing on ANT, institutional ethnography, and international law scholarship, Van Den Meerssche sheds fascinating new light on how legal experts crafted, sustained, and remade notions of the "rule of law" since the end of the Cold War. Just as importantly, it provides a close and surprisingly moving study of the efforts of successive generations of privileged people to try to figure out how to live in, with, through and despite their laws. * Fleur Johns, Professor & ARC Future Fellow, UNSW *
Famously, over the past decades, international legal scholarship experienced several turns. There's been a 'theory turn', 'practice turn', 'empirical turn', for example, and, of course, a 'turn to history'. In The World Bank's Lawyers, Van Den Meerssche performs all these turns and more with mastery, eloquence and unique fluency. Borrowing with ease from theoretical and methodological debates across law and social sciences, with a keen eye for unexplored sources, and a stanch commitment to describing what lies behind -and beneath- the World Bank's endorsement of 'the rule of law', his analysis debunks traditional assumptions about the Bank's long and tense affair with law, legality and lawyers. The Bank, an institution committed to transparency and yet one that remains stubbornly a black box, is laid bare -along with its General Counsel- as never before. * Luis Eslava, Kent Law School *
If law offers the language in which political and economic conversations are conducted, it stands to reason that students of IO law familiarize themselves with the discipline's formal grammar, encapsulated in abstract terms as 'implied powers', 'functional necessity', or 'rule of law'. Yet, as Van Den Meerssche shows in this path-breaking study, there is much to be gained from studying the way this language is used on a daily basis in an institution as the World Bank. Inspired by the likes of Latour and, in some ways, current passions for empirical legal studies, and informed by a firm command of legal tradition and doctrine, Van den Meerssche offers a beautifully composed and elegantly written dissection of the law in action in the World Bank. The World Bank's Lawyers is compulsory reading for everyone interested in international organizations law. * Jan Klabbers, University of Helsinki *
If the title "The World Bank's Lawyers" makes you think boredom squared, think again. This is one of the liveliest accounts of international law I have ever come across. * Sarah Nouwen, Co-Editor in Chief of the European Journal of International Law and Professor of Public International Law at the European University Institute, Firenze, Italy *
I find myself reading Dimitri Van Den Meerssche's book The World Bank's Lawyers with admiration…Van Den Meerssche's exposes those moments in the practice of General Counsels in a skillful and original way that is exemplary for the power of description we should indeed praise. * Michael Riegner, Assistant Professor of Law, Erfurt University *