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* I thank Ronen Shamir and Haya Stier for their guidance and The Colton Fund, The Israel Foundations Trustee, The Chutick Scholarship, The Lord and Lady Sieff Doctoral Fellowship, The William P. and R. Lowenstein Doctoral Fellowship, The Cegla Center, and Tel-Aviv University for their support. I am also grateful to Menachem Mautner, Hanoch Dagan, Shai Lavi, Dan Gibton, Daphne Barak-Erez, Hadar Aviram, Avi Cordova, Moussa Abou Ramadan, Motti Regev, Michal Frenkel, and the members of the Tel Aviv Faculty of Law Seminar, The Haifa University Law Faculty Seminar, the Bar Ilan Faculty of Law Seminar and the American Bar Foundation Seminar for their useful comments on earlier drafts. I also thank Dana Meshulam for her editorial contribution.
Introduction
Two decades have passed since Pierre Bourdieu (1987) applied his notion of social fields to law. Since then, the theoretical and methodological implications of conceiving law as a social field have received scant attention (García Villegas 2006, p. 58). The few who relate to Bourdieu's notion of 'juridical field' either dismiss it as too static to be useful to the understanding of the complexity and dynamism of law (Valverde, 2006), or use it uncritically in their studies. Interestingly, these studies are mainly grand-scale investigations mapping the historical development of a whole national or transnational juridical field (for example, Dezalay and Garth, 1996; Tomlins 2004; Cohen 2007). This paper seeks to join those who find the theoretical conceptualisation of law as a social field useful, but to do so critically, while focusing on the present ongoing activities taking place in a particular doctrinal legal field. Through a thick description of a segment of the Israeli legal field governing divorce, I demonstrate the potential of Bourdieu's field theory for the sociological understanding of law in action, if the theory is expanded to include also the informal dimensions of law.
Bourdieu's application of his social fields conception to law was limited to a discussion of the latter's adversarial dimensions. His brief description of the judge as 'a third-person mediator' stands in stark contrast to his definition of the 'juridical field' as 'a social space organized around the conversion of direct conflict between directly concerned parties into juridically regulated debate between professionals acting by proxy' (Bourdieu, 1987, p. 831)....