Bruno Latour: The Making of Law. An Ethnography of the Conseil d'Etat. Cambridge 2010: Cambridge Polity Press, 297 pp.
Abstract
Bruno Latour's The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d'Etat is an extraordinary book which deserves to be considered from various angles: anthropology and ethnography, legal theory and philosophy, actor-network-theory (ANT), and science and technology studies (STS). It deserves a wide readership, especially among those who are interested in the anthropology of legal modernity.
As an ethnographer, Latour takes us close to the workings of law embodied in the Conseil d'Etat (the French supreme administrative court and the legislative council of French government); not, as is often the case, by concentrating on concept-defi ning activities, but by focusing on the material practices of this legal institution. For an anthropologist it may be interesting to consider how an author, a nonjurist, has modifi ed the method of participant observation as applied to modern law, which is well known for its resistance to the ethnographic method of enquiry.
Despite being an outsider who does not know the 'native language' of jurists, Latour manages to record an impressive amount of unusual data as a spectator. For a jurist it must be interesting to see how the working of the legal body is conceived without fi ltration through the grid of legal theory.
The Conseil d'Etat is considered by Latour to be a common-law court, located in the heart of the continental code-based legal system. The comparative perspective should nevertheless be completed by the contrast between this French court which almost exclusively treats questions of law (legalism) and the courts that chiefl y treat questions of fact, irrespective of statutory provisions (equity).
ANT and STS researchers would probably be enthralled to see law not as a context of technology, as is usually the case, but as the (mediating) technology itself.