Pro Bono Power: How Commercial Law Firms Reconstruct International Law and Compliance

iCourts Lunch Seminar with Nina Reiners.

What effects does pro bono work for international institutions and domestic governments have on international law and politics? This talk presents a conceptual framework to trace how the growing involvement of large commercial law firms in pro bono engagements shapes the content, interpretation, and enforcement of international law, and global politics more broadly. Governments, multilateral organizations, and expert communities increasingly enlist commercial lawyers in international and domestic law‑ and policymaking, for reasons that can be grounded in international relations and socio‑legal theory. Yet existing accounts rarely theorize how international law itself is transformed in the process.

Drawing on transnational advocacy theory and theories of legal endogeneity, I argue that pro bono work by “big law” does not merely diffuse norms or rearrange professional fields. Instead, it feeds back into the institutional construction of legal meaning. Through these interventions, commercial lawyers often bolster the enforcement of international law while simultaneously reshaping what counts as compliance. Using cases from Ethiopia, South Africa, Mexico, and the United Nations as illustrative examples, the framework identifies private legal governance as a missing mechanism of how international law is made, interpreted, and reconstructed.