Deformalizing International Organizations Law: The Risk Appetite of Anne-Marie Leroy

Taking on this Symposium’s invitation to rethink international organizations law by focusing on scholars and practitioners outside the mainstream, this article explores and evaluates the legacy of Anne-Marie Leroy, the World Bank General Counsel from 2009 to 2016. In her attempt to trade the formal, rigid language of law for the deformalized routine of risk management – described as a ‘paradigm shift’ from ‘rules to principles’ – Leroy could be portrayed as an antipode to those who developed or nurtured the discipline of international organizations law. Yet it is precisely by focusing on figures working outside (and against) the diagrams of the discipline that we can gain a critical perspective on the evolving life of law in international institutions. The article specifically focuses on how Leroy’s paradigm shift sought to bypass, manage, and overcome problems of operational expansion and institutional accountability to the outside world – perhaps the two frontiers where the conceptual normative confidence of mainstream, functionalist approaches most manifestly hit their limits. In both domains, the article shows, the principled (occasionally prohibitive) posture of liberal legalism instilled by some of Leroy’s predecessors had to be traded for an attitude of ‘agility’ and enhanced ‘risk appetite’. This article traces these changes in the professional sensibility and material practice of international law(yering) and critically evaluates the ‘new normative architecture’ of ‘risk’ that underpins it. It is by dwelling in this disjunction between familiar doctrinal dilemmas and mundane material practices of lawyering – a space teeming with unexpected rules and routines – that a critical reinvigoration, reorientation, and re-theorization of international organizations law can emerge.