The Work of Legitimacy

What makes a law or regulation legitimate? This article develops a sociological approach that locates legitimacy not outside the law but in the work performed by a network of actors that cuts across the boundaries of the state. Drawing on Weber, Habermas, and Szelenyi, we suggest that legitimacy should be understood as the element that increases the probability of compliance with legal commands. We argue that this element cannot be a psychological “belief in legitimacy” but should be understood as work performed by the staff to construct and repair the discursive mechanisms that make legal commands defensible. We then draw on Actor-Network Theory to analyze this work as translation and offer two empirical examples: labor legislation in China and vaccine mandates in the United States. Throughout, we compare our approach with different lines of research in the law and society literature, noting where our conclusions converge and where they represent potential revisions to this literature.