Lawyer, the Media Is Not Your Friend: The Rise of “Influencer Lawyers” and the Formation of the Legal Field in Costa Rica

Abstract (English)

Traditional legal positivism holds that law is isolated from other disciplines. However, scholars of colonial legal history have shown that the imposition of industrial societies relied on the complex influence of other normative orders (economic and political for example), which reconfigured preexisting legal frameworks. Pierre Bourdieu argued that law is neither neutral nor immune to such pressures. He conceptualized the “legal field” as a structured space where competing agents dispute the legitimacy of defining what counts as law. In Costa Rica, legal practice is shaped by symbolic power relations that produce change beneath a façade of institutional neutrality.
This research explores one such structural shift, especially in relation to the legal profession and the dominant medium. Historically, European culture and Western law emerged as collectivized oral traditions. By the fifteenth century, these were replaced by written culture, emphasizing individualization and authorial innovation. Written law then spread globally as the vanguard of colonialism, becoming central in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, we live in a third era, dominated by the audiovisual medium, whose semiotic codes introduce new variables into legal practice.
This study proposes a critical framework and a mixed-methods design to examine the rise of “influencer lawyers”. It draws on critical legal studies, the studies on mediology of Régis Debray, Marshall McLuhan’s medium theory, Guy Debord’s concept of spectacle and Jean Baudrillard’s idea of simulation. The goal is to develop operational definitions to understand the fragmented, semi-structured articulations of the hegemonic medium and its role in shaping legal discourse.
Ultimately, this research is about a new type of lawyer being born, one who no longer cares whether they defend the innocent or the worst of murderers, that’s secondary, what matters most is to shine. And while most of us still don’t admit it, for some, stardom has already become their strongest legal argument.