Law’s Metamorphosis—Rupture, Reconstruction and Recollection

Abstract

Abstract Part II explores the institutional interventions, cosmopolitan aspirations and changes in legal culture enacted and embodied by Roberto Dañino, General Counsel from 2003 to 2006. Chapter 4 starts by exploring the difficulties facing the legal department in the context of President James Wolfensohn’s arrival and Shihata’s later departure. It shows how, in Shihata’s shadow, ‘the law had become fossilized’. Second, the chapter analyses the crisis narratives and strategies adopted by Dañino to make the legal department ‘relevant again’. It traces the managerial changes he instated, which fundamentally altered legal practice in the institution. Drawing on original interview material and a wide range of sources (legal strategies and opinions, project appraisals and public talks and presentations), the chapter reveals the immense labour invested in Dañino’s agenda of professional change. It signals the substantive direction of this agenda, expressed in new templates of risk assessment, the professional prototype of the ‘how to’ lawyer and the ideal of ‘client satisfaction’. Third, while the chapter gives an account of transformation, it also displays that—even at this pivotal juncture—the life of law is marked by both change and continuity. This shows the importance of studying legal ‘culture’ and the slow, arduous and conflictious process of ‘cultural change’. In tracing these changes, the chapter sheds light on an important episode in the history of the World Bank’s legal department and the institution more generally. This was an episode in which new professional vocabularies, operational ambitions, corporate templates and moral aspirations were projected on practices of international law(yering).