{"id":4250,"date":"2011-02-07T07:01:14","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T11:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/?p=4250"},"modified":"2013-10-09T15:46:58","modified_gmt":"2013-10-09T19:46:58","slug":"issue_52-1_krever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/2011\/02\/issue_52-1_krever\/","title":{"rendered":"The Legal Turn in Late Development Theory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Long cherished by liberal political philosophers, today the rule of law is increasingly viewed as a necessary requirement, or even silver bullet, for economic development. The past decade has seen the rise of a veritable industry\u2014multilateral development banks, government development agencies, and nongovernmental aid organizations\u2014committed to promoting the rule of law through legal and judicial reform in developing countries. This Article considers the emergence of a new rule of law orthodoxy within contemporary development theory and, in particular, the World Bank\u2019s development model. It asks how and why the Bank has embraced the rule of law discourse, and offers a brief genealogy of the rule of law within the Bank\u2019s theorizing. It argues that the Bank\u2019s interest in law was primarily a response to the critique and failure of its neoliberal policies and identifies the new discourse\u2019s affinities with the rise of New Institutional Economics and \u201cgood governance\u201d in the 1990s. Under the Bank\u2019s view, the law\u2019s value for economic development lies in its ability to provide a stable investment environment and the predictability necessary for markets to operate. The role of law is reduced to the facilitation of utility maximizing exchange and optimal market allocation, a view that informs many of the Bank\u2019s specific law reform projects. More a rhetorical shift than a fundamental break in development theorizing, the Bank\u2019s turn to law actually undergirds many continued neoliberal assumptions and masks a continuation of neoliberalism\u2019s core tenets. The new discourse is attractive precisely because it provides strong ideological support for the neoliberal agenda.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/84\/2011\/02\/HILJ_52-1_Krever1.pdf\">Read full article (PDF)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This Article considers the emergence of a new rule of law orthodoxy within contemporary development theory and, in particular, the World Bank\u2019s development model. It asks how and why the Bank has embraced the rule of law discourse, and offers a brief genealogy of the rule of law within the Bank\u2019s theorizing. It argues that the Bank\u2019s interest in law was primarily a response to the critique and failure of its neoliberal policies and identifies the new discourse\u2019s affinities with the rise of New Institutional Economics and \u201cgood governance\u201d in the 1990s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-print-archives"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZu3S-16y","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}