ABSTRACT
The chapter deals with the legal training delivered at the National School for Administration (ENA), a selective post-graduate program created in 1945 to train French top civil servants. Given the importance of law in the construction and legitimization of the French state, the legal teaching at the ENA is envisaged as a form of socialization into state power. Based on observations of contemporary ENA law classes, the chapter brings to light the nature of this socialization, and its meaning as far as the role of law and lawyers in the regulation of the state is concerned. It shows how law classes contribute to socializing students to their civil service duty and to establishing a Weberian conception of the state based on the respect of legal formalism. But the teaching also encourages students to “play” with law and to adopt an instrumental relationship with it, feeding a market-oriented vision of the state. As the transmission of a utilitarian vision of law characterizes ongoing transformations of legal training in France, the chapter argues that ENA reflects, and feeds, broader changes in the making of the power elite, and in the status of law in the regulation of contemporary society.
