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How do the corporate laws of Global South jurisdictions differ from their Global North counterparts? Prevailing stereotypes depict the corporate laws of developing countries as either antiquated or plagued by problems of enforcement and misfit despite formal convergence. This Article offers a different view by showing how Global South jurisdictions have pioneered heterodox stakeholder approaches in corporate law, such as the erosion of limited liability for purposes of stakeholder protection in Brazil and India, the adoption of mandatory corporate social responsibility in Indonesia and India, and the large-scale program of Black corporate ownership and empowerment in South Africa, among many others. By incorporating broader public policy and distribution objectives into corporate law, heterodox stakeholderism can be interpreted as an institutional adaptation--be it sensible or misguided--to a context of high inequality and externalities that remain unaddressed through other areas of law. As the rise of inequality and growing distrust in the state's ability to tackle social and environmental concerns have brought the Global North closer to the Global South's realities, the resurgent interest in stakeholderism in the developed world constitutes a surprising form of "reverse convergence" that merits greater attention. Finally, heterodox stakeholderism in the Global South also responds to critical, but heretofore neglected, distributional implications of corporate law rules, such as limited liability for environmental harm caused by corporate subsidiaries, which tend to enrich Global North companies and investors at the expense of Global South victims. These findings have implications for ongoing debates in corporate law, comparative law, law and development, and business and human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International development can be understood as a particular way of seeing the world that is both a pedagogical and a political project. It frames the citizens of "underdeveloped" states as subjects, available to be both "seen" and "known" in particular ways that have important implications for governance and law. This Special Issue approaches development as a discourse and as a set of practices that encompass a "way of seeing" and operate as a "frame" through which the subjects of development are apprehended and acted upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Note examines a statute approved by Vietnam's National Assembly in June 2020: the Law on Investment in the Form of Public-Private Partnerships. Analyzing the statute and two of its publicly available drafts, this Note argues that the new legislation is unlikely to achieve its goal of generating development through expanded, cost-effective infrastructure projects. Further, it argues that the new statute's deficiencies flow from the inability of the current institutional approach-known as law and development-to learn from the failures of previous developmental reform efforts. Though establishing a legal framework for public-private partnerships may facilitate infrastructural expansion and serve a vital role in economic development, this comes at great cost. In the long term, the Vietnamese state may suffer diminished administrative and financial capacity as a result of the new statute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal transplants are broadly recognized as one of the main mechanisms by which donor states influence the legal development of recipient states. The experience of China, however, challenges convention. While, in recent years, China has been one of the largest capital-exporting countries in the world and has mobilized law to protect its investment in high-risk recipient states, legal transplants have, to date, not played a major role in China's approach to law and development. This article examines this puzzle through the case of China's participation in formulating Vietnam's 2018 SEZ Bill. In doing so, this article sets forth a number of hypotheses as to why Chinese law has thus far not assumed the form of legal transplant. The example of the SEZ Bill demonstrates how Chinese legal transplants depend as much on the "pull" of recipient states as they do on the "push" of the donor. The case-study of the SEZ Bill raises important questions not only for Chinese law and development, but also, more generally, for the viability of "second-order" legal transplants: those from an Asian donor to an Asian recipient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the conflict of norms in the interface between the "transplanted" formal law and the local social norms in the land-law reforms in Vietnam and Myanmar, each representing different legal families, while sharing commonness in that both have attempted law-making in the post-colonial independence period in order to restore the basis of the livelihoods of the local population. Both of the legal concepts of "land-use right" (quyen su dung dat) in Vietnam and "land-use right for cultivation" (loat paing kwint) in Myanmar have been the product of law-makers' restorative attempts at farmland security, while intentionally avoiding usage of the term "ownership" that would result in the capitalist transaction of land as a commodity. However, the contemporary land-law reforms led by donor-oriented "legal transplant" in these countries have resulted in the plunder of such policy, by reintroducing the same mechanisms of land exploitation as existed in the colonial days. Roaring protests of the local agricultural population seem to be a rising-up of the social norm descended from the immemorial past as an unwritten Constitution to bring an end to the centuries-long movement of "legal transplant" of the modern capitalist law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaboration is considered an effective solution to improve business strategies. However, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) often lack common principles and common forms of contractual coordination. Several policies implemented by the EU have addressed the set-up of a comprehensive SME policy framework, but European institutions seem to have focused more on organisational devices to conduct business activities rather than on contractual forms of coordination. In April 2009, Italy adopted a law in network contract to promote the development of inter-firm cooperation strategies to foster enterprises’ innovation and growth. Even if this law represents a novelty in Europe and may offer new challenges and hints, it still presents some lacks in its formulation. The current research aims at presenting the Italian law for network contract and a comparison with other models of SME aggregations adopted in EU countries. A formal model to support the design of an SME network was proposed, by providing both an ontology-based model to help the definition of the contract in a structured way, and a basic workflow to identify the important phases of the network design, i.e. the feasibility study and the negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ambition of this article is twofold. First, it argues that, in order to enhance respect for the rule of law by its Member States, the EU has launched a new strategy albeit essentially based on mechanisms which were not specifically designed to protect the rule of law. Second, the article aims to clarify the notion of rule of law resulting from this strategy and to subsequently analyse its consequences. In doing so, this article will thereby demonstrate that the instruments used by the new strategy promote a notion of the EU rule of law which implies a constant arbitrage between the rule of law and the economic objectives pursued by the EU. The risk may be, however, that it would subjugate fundamental values (as defined in Article 2 TEU) to the logic of European economic integration, thus inverting the hierarchy between protection for the rule of law and economic values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established in 2018, the China International Commercial Court (CICC) represents a major step of China's top-down effort in its capacity building in terms of its national dispute resolution infrastructure, judicial personnel, as well as the ambition to create a Belt and Road lex mercatoria and legal harmonization. Through a close examination of the legal framework of the CICC, the paper argues that the establishment of the CICC has showcased a shift in the paradigm in the Beijing Consensus in the context of law and development via a more active top-down, institutional and hard-law approach. The article argues that the shift in paradigm does not mean that China is necessarily moving away from or abandoning the norm-based soft-law approach. Instead, it is likely that both Yin (soft power) and Yang (hard power) of China's law and development will be a complementary attempt in its overriding "Rule of Law China" (fazhi zhongguo) vision. It is further argued that the establishment of the CICC will represent a reshaping and readjustment of the Beijing Consensus amidst the tension between Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative and Washington's Indo- Pacific Strategy, signifying a more determined and proactive mindset in the ideological tug of war in the realm of legal architecture and the international rule of law discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author draws parallels between the source material on the effects of law on the economic development of countries and on the effects of accounting standards on financial reporting outcomes. The main argument is that these materials are complementary in regard to what they reveal about understanding the effects of law, regulations, and accounting standards on economic and financial reporting outcomes. The material also suggests that U.S. securities laws and reporting standards have adopted a more regulatory direction over time. Attention is also given to the effects of the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) globally.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including legal transplants, law and development, and land reform.

The expansion of extractive industries into the territories of Indigenous peoples has been, and continues to be, a challenging process for governments, industry, and Indigenous peoples all over the world. While the economic benefits of resource development are important, too often these considerations are emphasized at the expense of appreciating the deep and lasting social and cultural effects of these impacts on communities, in particular, Indigenous communities. Research has illustrated that these impacts are compounded when one considers those individuals at the intersection of these communities, such as Indigenous women. This article will examine whether or not international human rights law can effectively protect Indigenous women and girls from the negative effects of extractive industry development. By focusing on the right to self-determination, as captured by the United Nations Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples, it argues that the most effective way international law can work to protect Indigenous women in this period of increased extractive development is by providing a mechanism through which Indigenous laws and practices can be operationalized. This means creating space during consultative processes for Indigenous women to share their knowledge and influence the process in a meaningful way. The promotion of the procedural rights of Indigenous women is the best way to ensure the protection of their correlating substantive rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using law and development experience in the Global South, this Article dialogically engages with law and development theories advanced by the Global North grouped under three rubrics: liberal legalism, neoclassical institutionalism embraced by the Chicago School, and new constitutionalism. It argues that from the Global South's perspective, the Global North's theories provide some relevant propositions but also entail significant challenges. This Article therefore proposes three pluralist conceptual models of law and development including pluralist legalism, pluralist institutionalism, and pluralist constitutionalism. By doing so, this Article contributes to the understanding of limitations and possibilities inherent in law and development theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines the role of political leadership in shaping and sustaining institutional reforms. While leadership has recently attracted a great deal of attention from other social scientists, law and development scholars have only begun to seriously consider the influence of leaders on institutions and development outcomes. The article explores the new mantra that "leadership matters" as cause for both careful optimism and renewed attention to some deeper anxieties about the future directions of law and development. On one side, emerging models of leadership provide important insights about how to change dysfunctional institutions and how to sustain those changes over the long run. A number of major studies published in the last few years have made some version of the claim that successful reforms inevitably require the dedicated leadership of one or more prominent individuals, positing good leaders as a necessary condition for institutional transitions. But the argument that good leadership itself determines good institutions also risks reproducing one of the most obstinate dilemmas in modern social theory: the contest between "structure" and "agency" as causal explanations of social change. If the new mantra that "leadership matters" represents a shift in focus away from the structure of law and politics and towards the influence of individual agents' choices, actions, talents and beliefs, there is good reason to be sceptical about whether simply privileging agency over structure—or the inverse—has any greater chance of success than the many failed attempts to do just that in other fields of knowledge over the past several decades. Instead, the present moment could be a valuable opportunity to assess whether alternative and more integrative approaches to the longstanding structure-agency impasse in development law and policy are possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a long look at the law and development movement and its attempts to entrench the rule of law in developing countries in Asia via the means of legal technical assistance (LTA) designed to reform judiciaries and judicial bodies. It does so with special reference to Myanmar, being the latest instance of LTA in Asia. Currently there are more than 30 organisations working directly on rule of law LTA in Myanmar. Such efforts ought to represent the state of the art after half a century of LTA. The article looks at the trajectory of law and development since the 1960s, noting that the phases of law and development have led us through inaugural, critical, revivalist "moments" to a "post-moment" that appears to be pluralistic, and contextually nuanced. It notes that judicial reform has always featured in LTA through all of these "moments", and discusses whether or in what circumstances judicial reform is the most desirable or justifiably prioritised approach to rule of law LTA. It concludes that in the current phase of law and development too much emphasis is placed on judicial reform, explaining why this is so and why other approaches could be more profitable. The argument leads to a conclusion that we might now usefully identify a "Burmese" moment in law and development—one in which we realise that one size will never fit all cases, that law and development is multi-faceted and needs to be broken down into distinct modes of operation. In this dispensation, the opportunity is offered to secure real and ongoing gains in rule of law technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore whether and how Middle Eastern legal process can be reconciled with the idea of timeliness. The idea that any procedure physically within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions could be both fair and expeditious may appear counterintuitive to those brought up in the Anglo-American legal tradition, and the suggestion that there could exist a notion of "timely Middle Eastern procedure" that produced just and fair results is more than likely to be treated as an oxymoron. Administrative, political and legal processes throughout the Levant and Arab world are, when viewed through Western eyes, more than likely to be characterised as corrupt, slow or even Kafkaesque. I argue that procedural delay is an inherently problematic and relative concept, both legally and culturally speaking, which cannot make sense without introducing robust time standards against which court processing time can be evaluated. I seek to elucidate the fundamental nature and causes of procedural delay in relation to civil trials and propose the adoption of a distinct methodology that could be used to more objectively assess court efficiency in handling civil cases throughout the GCC and MENA regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this review to mark the 25th anniversary of Social and Legal Studies (SLS), we offer an assessment of the evolution of socio-legal scholarship on the Third World. We seek to locate the journal in the broader history of socio-legal studies and legal education in the United Kingdom and to consider its engagement with the work of Third World scholars. In order to do this, we recall the founding commitment of the journal’s first editorial board to non-western perspectives on law and locate this commitment both historically and biographically. We explore a number of important interventions concerned with socio-legal studies in the Third World, but also point to significant gaps and omissions since 1992. To end, we argue for a reassertion of SLS’s founding commitments to anti-imperial scholarship and the challenges posed by critical, non-western perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects critically on the instrumental value of law in the anticorruption struggle in Africa. Three questions are central to this reflection: (a) Is the instrumental use of law to achieve a developmental purpose, such as anti-corruption, defensible in theory and practice? (b) Is law necessary to, and/or adequate for, the creation of an anti-corruption norm? (c) Why do the developing countries perform so poorly in the fight against corruption in comparison with their wealthier, industrialized counterparts? While the article defends the instrumentalization of law in this regard, it argues that the African normative context of corruption throws up peculiar challenges. The article suggests that these challengesmust be confronted in order to liberate the full potential of law in the struggle against corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing best practices for aid delivery are well known and largely uncontroversial but often neglected by bilateral and multilateral aid agencies because of domestic political considerations and bureaucratic resistance. Developing countries should unilaterally ratify an agreement committing them, in the future, after they have experienced sustained and robust economic, social, and political development, to establish their own foreign aid programs that follow existing best practices for aid delivery. Such foreign aid reciprocity agreements would have numerous benefits, including: being an international tool to signal a developing country's resolve to reform and a domestic tool to pressure corrupt public officials to improve; enabling developing countries to take a leadership position in international development discourses; putting pressure on developed countries to implement best practices; and encouraging other developing countries to support and eventually adopt aid reciprocity agreements, which would lead to an increase in the amount of aid in the future. Furthermore, the idea of unilateral reciprocity agreements could potentially be expanded to areas of international interaction beyond foreign aid such as finance, trade, security, technology transfer, migration, and environmental policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is, on the one hand, to explain what clientelism is through a description of its characteristics in its current Argentinean form. On the other hand, it will evaluate clientelism from a legal and political point of view. In order to achieve these purposes, we will distinguish clientelism from legitimate politics, and then offer a critical evaluation in case there were any differences. Regarding the first objective, it will be necessary to resort to some kind of canonical definition, broad enough to grasp different clientelistic phenomena. Then, it will be possible to explain its Argentinean particularities, noting that it happens to be a specially interesting kind of clientelism because of its refinement and breadth. As to the second objective, we will oppose to the reasoning that equates clientelism and legitimate types of political action. We will argue that ordinary politics is different and that, in fact, this difference turns clientelism illegitimate. Criticism against clientelism may include empirical approaches but, as these only show deficiencies of a particular public policy, they lack the ability to be extended to other cases. Alternative criticism may be more interesting, but it will necessarily be weaker as it may only reveal a model of citizens and political relations upon which clientelism is grounded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how South Africa despite having one of the most lauded constitutions and legal frameworks in the world has been unable to advance as a developmental state in economic development and institutional building endeavours. The contention of this paper is that the South African government, prioritising law and development, did so at the expense of institutional building for economic development purposes. Law and development is conceptualised in this paper as States prioritising liberal actions such as separation of powers (judiciary, executive and legislature) and human rights. Consequently, this paper is not arguing against some of the tenants characterising the law and development agenda. Rather it asks, did South Africa lose its credentials as a possible developmental state by prioritising law and development initiatives over building developmental state institutions for local economic development purposes in particular? Ultimately, this paper contends that for South Africa to become a functional developmental state it needs to reconsider its constitutional/law and development aspirations, in favour of reconfiguring government institutions to prioritise economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a series of papers prepared for the "2016 Law and Development Conference: From the Global South Perspectives," held in Buenos Aires, Argentina and co-sponsored by Universidad Austral, the Law and Development Institute and the Inter-American Development Bank's Institute for the Integration of Latin America and the Caribbean (INTAL). The introduction aims to show one of the major contributions from the law and development field of study: scholars reveal the frequent disconnection between law and development; then, by uncovering contextual factors and proposing innovative solutions, they reconnect law with development. This provides an important support for the adoption of national development policies and the implementation of international development projects. Over forty years after the seminal paper by Trubek and Galanter,1 scholars are no longer in self-estrangement. The papers presented in the Special Issue illustrate this point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable development is a normative conceptual framework for integrating economic development, social well-being, and environmental protection in decision making. While it is widely recognized that lawyers have an important role to play in advancing sustainable development, and while a growing number of lawyers describe themselves as doing sustainability work, it is less clear what they actually do. This is an impediment not only to achieving sustainability but also to law students and lawyers who want to direct or redirect their legal careers toward sustainability. This Article, which is based on structured interviews with twenty-six lawyers who practice or have practiced law related to sustainability, provides a first assessment of what this work entails. It describes what these lawyers understand sustainability or sustainable development to mean, both as defined and as applied. These lawyers tend to see sustainability as a lens for productively addressing all legal problems and for helping clients make better decisions. The Article explains who their clients are and what they do for them, and provides insight into the dynamics of attorney- client conversations related to sustainability. It describes key personal and professional qualities of these lawyers, such as how they became interested, and what they like and do not like about doing work related to sustainability. Finally, by exploring what these lawyers see as obstacles to sustainability and where the jobs are in sustainability-related law, it sheds light on the future of sustainability in law practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary How does a globalized context influence domestic development policies and the allocation of government resources in an authoritarian country like China? This study explores the coalitional politics in China’s transition from foreign direct investment (FDI) attraction to domestic technology upgrading, which created winners and losers in the local allocation of government resources. Drawing on comparative case studies, semi-structured interviews and newly compiled data at the city level, the study finds that the varied levels of government support for domestic upgrading are shaped by coalitions for or against the transition. The major obstacle for bureaucrats within a city government to garner resources for domestic technology does not directly depend on the overall level of FDI. Rather, it comes from the vested interest of international commerce bureaucrats. These bureaucrats are more likely to form a cohesive coalition when the export share of foreign firms is large. At the same time, such a coalition is more likely to gain political influence when industrial sales are concentrated in large firms. The direction and magnitude of foreign capital influence, therefore, is channeled and manifested through local bureaucratic coalitions. This study sheds light on the politics of implementing development policies in an era in which globalization has cultivated fragmented interests within the local bureaucracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of the emergence and evolution of the concept and field of Law and Development. The concept of Law and Development covers a variety of aspects. These aspects acquire different meanings depending on different criteria and approaches. It depends on the geographical context, depends on the scope and meaning that is given to the concept of "development," and depends on whether a disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach is followed. The paper does not present the development of Law and Development as a historical sequence of stages or waves, but rather emphasizes simultaneity, cross-fertilization and dialogue, convergence and divergence, and hidden connections between approaches. It recognizes that there is no unique or "best" way to map and classify the various approaches to Law and Development and their respective abundant literature. There is no unique criterion neither to establish the scope and borders of this field. Fuzziness and overlap between categories and areas are unavoidable. The paper opted for a fundamental distinction between approaches on the basis of their scope, and taking the law as point of departure, as follows: national perspectives (the economics-oriented/institutionalist approach versus the anthropology- and sociology- oriented approach), international perspectives (public international law perspective and the Third World Approaches to International Law), the transnational approach, comparative Law and Development, and finally, approaches based on transnational thematic areas (human rights, sustainable development, and transitional/restorative justice and post-conflict law). From this mapping exercise, the author draws conclusions of two types: conclusions related to the object and scope of Law and Development, and conclusions related to the functioning of Law and Development as a community of scholars and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Change has played and continues to play a crucial role in life as in law. In the context of the search for a future system of global governance, law expresses change also through the concept of development or a debate known as 'law and development'. This debate is characterized by the notion of a 'developing country' and its frequent opposition with what is commonly called a 'developed country'. Their opposition, as the terminology in general, appears not only inadequate to tackle the global governance challenges of the 21st century but also flawed both in philosophical and conceptual terms. This article, therefore, enquires into the causes for the terminology to be inadequate and advocates instead the use of the more dynamic and inclusive term of 'development policy', which seems more adequate for the objective of establishing a consistent body of global law supportive of the principles of sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to bring into discussion the potential, and yet overlooked the normative contribution of the internationally declared right to development to address "development hazards" in domestic realities. Of particular interest is the examination of the distinctive principles of resource control, participation and distribution of benefits and their use as tools to combat negative impacts of a development project. For this purpose, the concept of "development hazards" is defined and explored in order to establish an analytical framework for the implementation of the right to development in national development process. Using insights from the case of agricultural modernization in Merauke, Papua, realizing the right to development in practice would mean to understand the dilemmas concerning development process, as much as issues of power and agency that enable as essential in efforts to protect human dignity in development processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 'squatter' in the global South is another word for a seemingly incomprehensible heap of legal ambiguities, messy politics and abject poverty. Squatter dwellers are typically immigrants from the countryside, who squat on seized land and are caught in complex mazes of citizenship, labor and property laws. They are suspended in what I call 'juridical limbo'-a situation in which overlapping legal identities and contradictory laws render individuals or entire communities into a state of semi-legal existence. Many squatters have fallen through the cracks of the legal arena and are vulnerable to being evicted without proper rehabilitation, but some of them have indeed learnt to use the law's complications to their extralegal advantage. Using the case of two extraordinary land conflicts in India's most populous city-Calcutta-this paper contrasts the claim-making strategies of two squatter settlements, providing a rich ethnographic account of their differential success in protecting their territory against eviction and of navigating their semi-legal status. Alongside establishing this variation, this paper also interrogates the proximate causes of this variation and puts forth a theoretical framework that focuses on the legal relationship between the state and the urban poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Das Europäische Konzernrecht steht unverhofft wieder auf der rechtspolitischen Agenda. Wer Reformpläne schmiedet, sollte sich zunächst der Wege und Irrwege vergewissern, die man in mehr als fünf Jahrzehnten intensiver Diskussion beschritten hat. Der vorliegende Beitrag würdigt in einer akteurzentrierten Annäherung die konzernbezogenen Regelungs- und Denkimpulse von Kommission, Mitgliedstaaten, Europäischem Gerichtshof, Wissenschaft und Kautelarpraxis. Anschließend mustert er die zahlreichen unionsrechtlichen Vorschriften zu Unternehmensgruppen, die sich teils im Konzernrechtszentrum, teils in peripherer Streulage finden. Schließlich erörtert er, wie man die vielen verschiedenen Gesichter des Konzerns im Europäischen Wirtschaftsrecht zueinander in Beziehung setzen und wissenschaftlich verarbeiten kann. Unexpectedly, the law of corporate groups is back on the European political agenda. In order to move ahead, it may first be helpful to review the wrong turns and ways forward of past discussions. This paper does so by adopting an actor-centred approach, analysing the proposals and achievements of the European Commission , the Member States, the European Court of Justice, legal scholarship and corporate practice in this area. It continues by taking stock of the provisions related to groups of companies in European Union law whether at the centre of group law or scattered around its legal periphery. In conclusion, the paper points to the many facets of groups of companies from the different areas of European economic law and asks how they can best be correlated in order to develop a coherent overall framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on investments in Opportunity Zones, or economically distressed areas in U.S. states designated to encourage investment. Topics covered include qualified opportunity funds, capital gains investments, and tax deferrals.

This paper offers a critical overview and assessment of North's work on institutions and economic change, focusing on aspects of his work that are of interest to law and development scholars. It examines North's approach to institutions through his historical work focusing on his concept of credible commitment and his interpretation of the effect of the Glorious Revolution on property rights, focusing especially on the role he assigns to property rights in bringing about the Industrial Revolution. The paper also examines North's theory of institutions focusing on three main issues: the pervasive influence of the principles of neoclassical economics; the focus on an end-point model based on successful Western economies; and the failure adequately to account for the role of organizations in the process of change. Finally, the paper discusses the role of law in North's theory. The objective of this section of the paper is to clarify whether law, according to North is a protagonist in the process of institutional change or is merely a by-product of changes taking place elsewhere in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines several claims, counterclaims, and provocations connected to American Law and Literature scholarship is presented. Topics discussed include the rigorous assessment of the way law operates, criticism within Law and Literature and Economics; and need to reemphasize that Law and Literature, under that rubric as opposed to alternatives such as Law and Humanities or Law and Culture.

'Scholars in Self-Estrangement' was a major milestone in the field of law and development. In a paper delivered in 2014 at the University of Toronto on the Fortieth Anniversary of its publication, the author looked back over four decades. He observed that the field was created in the 1960s as an adjunct of development assistance but soon sought to become an independent academic endeavour: seeking to make the field more academic, the article critiqued early efforts as too policy dependent and ethnocentric. But shortly after the article was published, law and development slowed down: it had lost support of development agencies before it could establish a secure place in the academy. Then, by the 1990s, it had revived, and today there is a proliferation of research, much of which has avoided the errors pointed to in 'Scholars.' However, the field has now split into a number of subdisciplines that do not always communicate with one another, despite the interdependence of different facets of development. To the challenge created by this fragmentation are added two other main concerns: new theories of development that stress experimentation and local variation, and the irreducible local embeddedness of legal systems. These suggest a need for greater emphasis on context for the definition of reform strategies and raise questions about the viability of general laws about the relation between law and development. Thus, the author notes here that the field now confronts the twin challenges of interdependence and context. Recognizing that there is no easy formula to meet these challenges, he concludes that building capacity in the Global South for interdisciplinary- and policy-oriented work is a necessary first step. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the evolution in thinking among scholars and development agencies with respect to the relationship between law and development in the post-war period, in the context of the rise and fall of universal themes of development. For much of this period, universal theories of development prevailed, beginning with various versions of modernization, state-led theories of development that prevailed in the first three post-war decades and that often yielded disappointing outcomes. These were supplanted by in many respects the converse policy prescriptions: neo-liberal ('Washington consensus') policies that emphasized the role of markets and the limited capacity of governments in developing countries. These policies also often yielded disappointing outcomes. This perspective in turn was largely displaced in the 1990s by an emphasis on the role and quality of institutions in developing countries as a major determinant of their development prospects but, like prior universal theories of development, came to recognize, in the light of the mixed to poor record of donor-supported institutional reforms in many developing countries, that there is no general blueprint for the design of political, bureaucratic, and legal institutions in developing countries. The paper goes on to argue that while rejection of universal theories of development is generally to be welcomed, there are dangers in succumbing to an extreme form of relativism where each country 'must write its own history.' These dangers are illustrated by reference to the evolving and sometimes inconsistent views of two prominent law and development scholars -- David Trubek and Brian Tamanaha -- with respect to the role of the rule of law in development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this focus feature, David Trubek and Michael Trebilcock present an assessment of the past forty years of the law and development movement and map the challenges that lie ahead. While law and development research today seems to be on more solid ground than it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is still at risk of facing a second demise. The recent revival of the law and development movement has been marked by a research agenda increasingly attuned to the importance of local context. On the one hand, contextualization has countered the ethnocentric analysis produced in the Global North and exported to developing countries in the 1960s. On the other hand, attention to context has caused a severe fragmentation of the academic dialogue, as the concern with adaptation to particular circumstances defies any attempt to somehow connect these research efforts in one single conceptual framework. The new generation of law and development scholars is thus left with the challenge of maintaining contextualization, while avoiding letting the movement break down into a 'series of self-referential silos.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the onset of the Asian Financial Crisis the world has witnessed a re-accommodation of the global financial system. In the particular case of middle-income countries they have disentangled themselves from the conditionality of the IMF and grown into more assertive actors in international forums, proposing new alternative mechanisms to become more financially independent and for the provision of development assistance. This article critically reviews the new reality by assessing the strategies deployed by developing countries to reduce the IMF’s influence, and explores the potential consequences of the rise of middle-income nations for Law and Development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Conventional wisdom bolds that economic analysis of law is either embryonic or nonexistent outside of the United States generally, and in civil law jurisdictions in particular. Existing explanations for the assumed lack ofinterest in the application of economic reasoning to legal problems range from the different structure of legal education and academia outside of the United States to the peculiar characteristics ofcivilian legal systems. This Article challenges this view by documenting and explaining the growing use of economic reasoning by Brazilian courts. We suggest that the rise of economic reasoning in Brazilian legal practice is driven not by a supply push from scholars, but by a demand pull due to ideological, political, and legal factors, leading to greater judicial empowerment in the formulation of public policy. Given the ever greater role of courts in policy making, the application of legal principles and rules increasingly calls for a theory of human behavior (such as that provided by economics) to help foresee the likely aggregate consequences of different interpretations of the law. Consistent with the traditional role of civilian legal scholarship of providing guidance for the application oflaw by courts, the further development of law and economics in Brazil (as well as in other civil law jurisdictions) is therefore likely to be mostly driven by judicial demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article expresses the author's perspectives on the works of William Pietz on the aspects of historical forensics of contract in social order. It explores the importance of social and cultural workings of human interactions in individual energies and passions. It also notes on the impacts of social organization in a critical development of politics and government.

I critically examine the effort of new institutional economics (NIE) scholars to define, map, and measure the realm of formal and informal institutions, and to offer specific policy prescriptions. I also articulate why these efforts face insurmountable barriers, and demonstrate the limits of the NIE policy agenda by showing that scholars are repeating lessons learned in law and development over four decades ago. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses the specific norm-generation function of indicators in a human rights context, focusing on ways that indicators foreground and legitimize as 'truth' particular worldviews or values. It describes the stakes of this process through elaborating on the concept of 'indicatorization', focusing on one moment in which the relationship between human rights and development was defined through indicators: the indicatorization of the Right to Development by a un High Level Task Force in 2010. In this initiative, different perspectives on human rights, equality, participation and development from within the un and the World Bank were brought together. This resulted in a subtle but significant re-articulation of ideas contained in the 1986 un Declaration on the Right to Development. The article argues that how indicatorization happens, matters, and has important implications for the potential role of human rights discourse within international economic relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the potential role of the English law of secured transactions (ST) as a model for development of ST laws in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean Area which includes nations such as Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, focusing on comparative law. The roles that capital and credit markets play in the economic development of a country are mentioned, along with the legal regimes for the creation, perfection, and enforcement of security interests. Political instability is examined.