Law as an Organizational Technique

Abstract

One of the most striking developments in law has been the rise of its organizational dimension, in contrast to the classic vision, viewed as a set of prescriptions sanctioned by courts. Jean Paillusseau, an eminent member of the School of Rennes, was the precursor of this hypothesis, and developed the idea that a company is a legal technique for organizing a business. In a methodical way, the law implements a set of rules which tend to structure organizations to enable them to achieve their goals in the best conditions: organization of power and relations between the different members of the group (managers, partners, employees, etc.), corporate assets, group structure, and so on. This observation questions the nature of the relationship between law, in its organizational dimension, and management sciences. One of the responses has been the development of the Law & Management approach, aimed at identifying how companies can use the law strategically. However, there is a risk of seeing the law absorbed by the management sciences. To ward off this risk, this chapter will identify the singularity of the organizational role of the law. It stresses that unlike the management sciences, which have essentially a technical role (the search for efficiency), the legal system is a vector of social values: through the organizational mechanisms that it implements, it is a question of imposing on an organization the respect of ethical principles promoted by the legal order.