Rescaling the Legal Complex: Lawyers and the Resilience of the Liberal International Order

Abstract In times of political crisis and attacks against the foundations of political liberalism, can we put our trust in lawyers and other legal occupations to fight for our freedoms when they are under attack? The role of the legal profession in the rise, development, and resilience of political liberalism has been at the core of a body of work commonly framed as “the legal complex”: Terence C. Halliday and Lucien Karpik’s Lawyers and the Rise of Western Political Liberalism , Halliday, Malcolm Feeley, and Karpik’s Fighting for Political Freedom , Halliday, Karpik, and Feeley’s Fates of Political Liberalism in the British Post-Colony , and Feeley and Malcolm Langford’s The Limits of the Legal Complex. In view of the precariousness of political liberalism in contemporary global politics, this review essay reflects on the core ideas of the legal complex literature. By identifying connections with other strands of scholarship on legal agents, legal mobilization, and the move to law in transitional politics, I suggest rescaling the study of the legal complex to enable consideration of its relevance for the study of political liberalism at the international level of analysis and, specifically, of its importance to the resilience of the liberal international order currently in rapid decline.