Tom Ginsburg, Salil Mehra, Katharina Pistor, & Anna Gelpern
The Future of Law and Development
Welcome to the Law and
Development blog symposium! We are
thrilled to have a fantastic array of participants lined up and trust that the
discussion will be lively. In our call
for participation, we asked people to reflect on the diverse conceptions of “law
and development” and to take the opportunity to think about the directions the
field is headed. I would like to begin
by posing three questions for consideration, though I anticipate that we may
end up heading in quite different directions as well.
First, as an initial question, is Law and Development really a field? In a recent paper, Brian Tamanaha argues that Law and Development is “a poorly constructed category that lacks internal coherence . . . . Law and development work is better seen, instead, as an agglomeration of projects perpetuated by motivated actors supported by funding.”[1] Much depends, of course, on what we mean by a field. As a field of applied activity, Law and Development seems to have a clear boundary involving reform projects related to legal institutions. As a scholarly field, however, it may be less clear. On the one hand, we have two nascent journals, the Law and Development Review and the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, which is surely one sign of the institutionalization of a scholarly field. On the other hand, one might argue that there is sufficient lack of consensus on method and topic to deserve the title “field.” But if not a field, what is it?
Continue reading "Symposium: The Future of Law and Development, Part I" »
