| Summary: | This thesis suggests that it is impossible to consider any administrative agency in the
abstract without losing important elements of the nature of the legal environment within
which the agency operates. There is a large gap between the theories of formal
administrative law and the experience of practice in particular administrative settings.
Drawing upon the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the thesis develops the concept of
the legal administrative field as a means to approach this issue. The use of Bourdieu's
concepts of field, habitus and capital help to articulate and give a theoretical structure to a
process and series of practices that are otherwise hard to identify or study.
Two Alberta farm marketing boards, and certain specific legal issues faced by each board,
are examined in detail and analyzed in terms of the concept of the legal administrative
field. It is shown that for each board, the realm of what was 'legally possible' shifted
despite the fact that there were no changes in the formal administrative law and that legal
practice in these fields involves far more than the application of the principles of formal
administrative law. The intersection of the principles and habitus of formal administrative
law, the structure provided by the legislative and regulatory framework, and the respective
capital and habitus of all the individuals, agents and agencies within the field all interact
and these complex interactions are what structure the legal administrative fields and shape
the shifts which occur within them. In the struggles of interpretation which occur in these
fields an attempt to make a clear demarcation between the practice of law by lawyers and
the administration of the system by administrators is inadequate; it simplifies and renders
invisible much of the complex series of interactions in which the legal practitioner is a
participant and which create the field in which he or she practices.
The conclusion is that the heuristic value of the legal administrative field in relation to the
legal issues faced by the two marketing boards, and in relation to legal practice in the farm
marketing area has been established and that this concept provides a useful perspective
and a valuable supplement to a more traditional approach. === Law, Peter A. Allard School of === Graduate
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