On Pierre Bourdieu's Legal Thought: Toward a Classic of Socio-Legal Studies

Although Pierre Bourdieu is one of the most important and influential sociologists of the twentieth century, his socio-legal thinking has become more widely recognized only recently. This is largely because Bourdieu never presented his own sociology of law; rather, he generated his socio-legal insights in passing while he focused on phenomena other than law. Nevertheless, he contributed extremely important ideas about law in modern societies. This article considers Bourdieu's legal thinking on socio-legal studies and discusses the hitherto untapped potential of his conceptions of law.