ABSTRACT
The concept of the legal field brings together Bruno Latour's insights regarding the assemblage of law in associative practices, and Pierre Bourdieu's argument that power shapes particular patterns of practice in any given field of social action. Posing the problem of differential positioning and resources also makes Bourdieu's work a useful tool in our analysis of the making of international criminal justice, as it provides an important account of power in the legal field. Latour's anthropology of law and Bourdieu's sociology of the juridical field offer important accounts of practice and law, but limited explanation of legal practice as such. The legal practices are semiotic and material actions that work to assemble entities of human and non-humans into new forms of association and relation. The material-semiotic mangle of law transforms and structures social controversy into a legal problem. The legal trial operates as the legal equivalent of the experiment seeking to establish the scientific claim.
