Law, Regulation, and Development

What is the relationship between law and development in the post-colonial era? Are particular types of legal institutions associated with particular modes of economic organization or trajectories of economic development? Is the relationship between law and development causal, in the sense that specific legal reforms cause specific development outcomes? These questions are not of merely academic interest. The answers have major implications for policy-makers. In this essay we trace major currents in the history of ideas about these topics, ranging from Max Weber and his successors to proponents of the “right to development. ” We then identify key limitations in the intellectual frameworks that have been dominant through the turn of the twenty-first century. Those limitations include: failure to draw upon the experience of countries in the global South; misplaced reliance upon problematic conceptual dichotomies such as Kevin E. Davis and Mariana Mota Prado Law, Regulation, and Development Chapter 12 Page 2 legal/non-legal, public/private, common law/civil law, and domestic/international; and failure to acknowledge the complexity and mutability of legal institutions. We conclude by examining emerging approaches that promise to overcome some of these limitations