Redistribution de la propriété et conflits de compétence à la frontière privé-public : les professions face à la réforme de la faillite en Grande-Bretagne et aux États-Unis

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Professions and Bankruptcy Reforms in Britain and the United States : Redistributing Property and Jurisdictional Rights across the Public-Private Frontier. The sociologies of law, professions, and politics rarely converge on the process of statutory reform. This paper argues that the concepts of property and jurisdictional rights provide a basis for theoretical convergence and a more compelling explanation of legal change where property redistribution is at stake. Using the cases of Insolvency Act 1986 in Britain and the 1978 U.S. Bankruptcy Code, the paper examines four processes of change concerned respectively with high property rights cases (Valorization of Judges, U.S., Empowerment of Insolvency Practitioners, U.K.) and low property rights cases (Nationalization of Administration, U.S. and Privatisation of Administration, U.K.). It proposes (1) that legal change frequently triggers jurisdictional struggles among professions and the latter in turn shape substantive and administrative law ; (2) in contemporary politics, a key struggle over jurisdictional rights frequently occurs across the public/private boundary, where inter-professional struggle is less over market share, than the expansion or contraction of the market itself ; and (3) substantive legal changes frequently constellate political forces — including party politics, professional politics, and political adventitiousness — with outcomes quite extraneous to the substantive merits of the law reforms themselves.