This volume presents seven essays by business and other researchers from Europe, who discuss legal intermediation using a contingent and processual approach that challenges the current portrayal of legal intermediaries by studying actors who are neither legal professionals nor corporate managers but influence the interpretation of the law; emphasizes the multiple roles of legal devices in shaping compliance or noncompliance; uses an intra-organizational and intra-industry perspective, rather than a field-based perspective; and investigates the relationship between law and economic activity within countries outside of the US and in areas of regulation other than anti-discrimination law. Essays address how activists can move corporate laws beyond compliance, using the example of LGBT and Muslim activists in French corporations; the devices professionals use to rely on the law in terms of tax rebates in French real estate and how this creates distrust toward the law; the 12-hour work legal mechanism of derogation in French public hospitals; nonlegal professionals acting as legal intermediaries; the relationship between the law’s ambiguity and organizational complexity; and contracts as compliance mechanisms in French retail regulation.

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, USA. He is also a Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor. He has written, co-written, or edited more than fifty books in the fields of law and political science.

Introduction: The Microfoundations of Legal Intermediation in Organizational Contexts; Sebastian Billows, Lisa Butcher and Jérôme Pélisse