Abstract
As a scientific discipline and profession, law has been for centuries at the heart of social and political power of many Western societies. Professors of law, as influential representatives of the profession, are important powerbrokers between academia, politics and the corporate world. Their influence is based on scientific reputation, institutional mandates inside and outside academia or privileged network connections with people in powerful positions. In this study, based on a full sample of all Swiss law professors in the years 1957, 1980 and 2000 (n = 311), we contrast two theories of the distribution of power among law professors: Bourdieu’s thesis on the trade-off between scientific reputation and (extra)-academic institutional power vs. the thesis of an opposition between a group of established incumbents and socio-demographically marginal challengers who try to gain access to the profession. We show that among Swiss law professors the endowment with scientific capital is not opposed to the possession of institutional power within (or outside) academia. Our findings reveal rather an opposition between a challenging group of professors devoid of resources and an incumbent fraction with a high amount of scientific, institutional and social capital alike. In the conclusion we discuss a series of explanations of this specific power structure, including the specific status scientific reputation and social capital can have for law professors.
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Notes
The term “fraction” as employed here and throughout this article corresponds to the French “fraction” as it is often used by Bourdieu. In general, the English versions of Bourdieu’s work translate it in this way. For Bourdieu, fractions, even though they share a certain number of characteristics in the social space, do not necessarily constitute “real groups.” The likelihood of these fractions to become organized and constitute themselves as groups depends on their homogeneity and their proximity in a given field.
It must be noted, however, that the opposition between incumbents and challengers, even if it is often central, is not the only possible structuring dimension of a field. Horizontal dimensions, for example, between generations or groups with different capital compositions, are often part of how a field is structured.
Nevertheless, in specific cases, the accumulation of a high amount of scientific capital can also be an entrance ticket into the area of academic governance.
For an example of such an analysis of a discipline (economics) as a field, see: Lebaron (2001).
In fact, this point is also an integral part of Bourdieu’s approach. He contends in Homo Academicus that the space of positions in the academic field is homologue to the social space. Professors from a privileged social background tend to occupy positions at the worldly pole of the academic field (Gingras 2012). Professors from a less well-off milieu are situated on the scientific pole.
Paradoxically, such a temporally limited social opening can even reinforce the legitimacy of the incumbents in place. They are then able to present them as a socially open group, composed according to meritocratic principles.
Recent analyses show that social networks still play a certain role for professors’ nomination in many disciplines (Lutter and Schröder 2016). In a French study, Godechot and Louvet (2008) show that when comparing disciplines, law is among those with the highest degree of localism. In France between 1972 and 1996, local doctors in law had a 37 times higher chance of being recruited than outside candidates, whereas the average odds ratio for local PhD candidates (in all disciplines) is at 18. In explorative analyses of our own data, we found that around 55% of all law professors teach at the university from which they earned their PhD (against an average of 40% in all disciplines together). In addition, we see that a small number of law professors bring a large number of their PhD students into elite positions: the five most “dynastical professors” produce no less than 65 future elite members.
The Catholic university of Fribourg is the only bilingual university.
While the Zurich area is both an industrial hub and home to many important banks, the pharmaceutical industry is situated in the region of Basel.
Excluding professors who were younger than 50 years in 2000 changes the representation of specific groups in the sample: Whereas the excluded group has a higher share of women than the remaining sample (15.9% versus 2.3%), the differences are only small when it comes to foreign professors (11.7% versus 16.4%). Differences concerning the law sub-discipline are not very important, except Roman or German law, which is much less frequent in the group of excluded younger professors (1.6% versus 8.1%). Indeed, in the law curricula at Swiss universities, the teaching of German and Holy Roman Empire models of civil law have gradually been replaced by comparative civil law and international private law courses.
For a long time, a rector’s official tenure was limited to one or two years in most Swiss universities. As this tenure was extended with the reform of university laws in the 1990s and 2000s, the status and influence of rectors have risen in the last decades.
The Swiss Science Council, founded in 1965, is the consultative organ of the federal council when it comes to science and research policies and had an important political role at least until the year 2000.
The Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences is one of the four Academies of Sciences in Switzerland (founded in 1946) that promotes the social and human sciences and helps to fashion Swiss science policy as an umbrella organization of all the disciplinary science associations in these sectors.
The Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation decides the allocation of research funding for Swiss university research and therefore has a key role in shaping the research landscape. The Foundation Council defines the positions and strategies of the SNSF in terms of research policy issues.
This society (called “Schweizerischer Juristenverein” in German and “Société Suisse des juristes” in French) was founded in 1861 and comprises more than 3,000 Swiss jurists. It publishes the Swiss law journal and organizes the yearly Swiss jurist day.
The Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland is the final arbiter on disputes in civil and public law and between cantons (states) and the Swiss Confederation.
These firms were chosen according to their capitalization, number of employees and turnover (Bühlmann et al. 2012a).
The economic elite are defined as members of the boards of the 110 most important firms. The political elite are defined as members of parliament, national party committees and the federal council at the benchmark dates. Administrative elites include the directors of federal departments and offices, as well as the federal judges. Other more qualitative indicators, such as the network composition (in terms of elite spheres), have been tested. However, this did not add much more information and failed to reveal further structural oppositions within the field of law professors.
In a first step, we have carried out separate analyses for sub-samples of each of the three benchmark years. These analyses showed that the general structure of the field of law professors has not changed dramatically. They resemble each other in 1957, 1980 and 2000. When projecting the cohorts of professors of the three years in the cloud of individuals of our MCA, this impression can be confirmed: The centroid points of the three cohorts are all very close to the barycentre (the intersection of the x and y axes), and their distance in the plane is clearly below a value of 0.5 (which would indicate a significant variation). For these reasons, we have decided to carry out the analyses on a pooled sample of all three cohorts (1957, 1980 and 2000).
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Acknowledgments
This study was funded by the Grant No. 143202 by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Academic Elites in Switzerland 1910–2000: Between Autonomy and Power).
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Bühlmann, F., Benz, P., Mach, A. et al. Mapping the Power of Law Professors: The Role of Scientific and Social Capital. Minerva 55, 509–531 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-017-9333-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-017-9333-1