Unpacking Legal Network Power: The Structural Construction of Transnational Legal Expert Networks

Abstract

In his contribution Unpacking Legal Network Power: The Structural Construction of Transnational Legal Expert Networks, Mikael Rask Madsen explores the sociological properties of legal expert power as a necessary supplement to the more descriptive approaches prevalent in studies of transnational regulatory networks. It argues that although notions of regulatory networks clearly have descriptive force and help identify new patterns of transnational law-making, deploying such notions also entail a real risk of leaving out of the analysis those precise social conditions and forces that make networks powerful in the first place. According to the chapter, to make regulatory network power intelligible, one needs to establish the linkage between legal networks and power, including state power, and thus the structured social spaces the networked power is exercised in.