ILSA PUBLICATIONS La Internacionalización de las Luchas por el Poder: La Competencia entre Abogados y Economistas por Transformar los Estados Latinoamericanos

“The international economy is far too important to be left to the economists.” With these words, Jeffrey Sachs—who, as Director of the Harvard Center for International Development, is one of the most influential development economists and has coordinated structural adjustment programs around the world, from Bolivia in the 1980s to Russia in the 1990s—closed his remarks before a select group of lawyers who gathered at Yale University at the end of 1998 to listen to his speech on the role of law and economics in the management of global markets (Sachs 1998). Sachs is right. The global economy—like policy decisions on the national economy, from setting the annual rate of inflation to the definition of the extent and content of social expenditures—is a political issue and, as such, its management concerns not just the “experts” but also professionals from different disciplines and citizens in general. Regardless, as the reader will easily notice while studying the remarkable book by Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth that I introduce in these pages, Sachs’ words are more interesting because of the circumstances in which they were uttered and their implication with regard to those circumstances, than for what they affirm, for two different reasons. In the first place, the person giving this advice is an economist and those listening to him are lawyers. As Dezalay and Garth lucidly demonstrate in their book,