Politicising legal conflicts: The case of German Tarifeinheit

How can a legal principle abandoned by a court be politically re-authorised through legislation only a few years later? This article examines the German conflict over Tarifeinheit, the principle that only one collective agreement should apply within a workplace. Drawing on Bourdieu's field theory and Eyal's concept of spaces between fields, it conceptualises politicisation as boundary work through which juridical and political distinctions are reproduced, contested and reconfigured. Combining legal discourse analysis with policy-field analysis, the article reconstructs how Tarifeinheit was delegitimised within juridical discourse before being recast as a political response to occupational-union strikes in critical infrastructure. It argues that juridical intellectuals mobilised a historically sedimented legal repertoire, translated juridical authority into politically effective claims and assembled cross-field networks around statutory recodification. In doing so, the article shows how political–economic transformation can make a juridically delegitimised doctrine newly actionable as a legislative response.