The legal field in Pierre Bourdieu: the production of a truth from the notion of private property in manuals of Law

Abstract

The analyses on Law focus either on the formal elements, either on the instruments and, in this way, it reduces the possibility of understanding the Law itself. The notion of legal field used by Pierre Bourdieu becomes an important instrument to understand this social universe of the legal world, that organizes the relations and delimits spaces, where the “Law operators” concurs between themselves for the monopoly of the right to say the Law. In this direction, the notion of private property in manuals of “Property Law” or “Law of Things” allows to describe this struggle process that occurs inside the  legal field, showing the construction of a practice and a proper legal speech, whose objectives are the production, reproduction and diffusion of a type of knowledge rather, than serve to crystallize the dominant legal thought.