ABSTRACT
Instead of this teleological perspective of the universal progress of law (and through the law), we have elected to examine the transformations in legal practice in Europe as one of the means – and effects – of a competition among different expertises and different fractions of elites in national fields of state power. This internal competition reappears as part of an international competition about the imposition of a dominant legal model – the so-called ‘rule of law’. The large corporate law firms of Wall Street – and their imitators from the City of London – constructed international as well as European markets in business law. Later, the major transnational NGOs emerged to adopt the same combination of lobbying and legal activism inspired by US practices.
