Law & Development in a Changing World

This course explores ideas about law's role in development, and the international development assistance practices such ideas have inspired. The idea that a “modern” legal system is central to development has its origins in the 19th century, but in the decades after World War II the idea became the basis for organized legal development assistance efforts. Today, bodies such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, the European Union, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the American Bar Association devote substantial resources to “law and development” and the “rule of law.” Yet while billions are being spent, the enterprise rests upon a wealth of contestable assumptions about the definition of law, the relationship of law to economic activity, the role of the state in economic governance, the appropriateness of external intervention in national legal systems, and the definition of development itself. In this course we will examine how both the underlying assumptions and the actual legal assistance efforts have changed over time, focusing on specific case studies from Northeast Asia, Latin America, the former Soviet Union, and China's One-Belt-One-Road initiative.