Law Commons^™

There Is No Single Field Of Law And Development, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

Let me begin – following Ohnesorge following Trubek and Santos – with the notion that the concepts of “law and development” and “rule of law” are closely intermingled with the process of legal reform in developing countries and the role foreign advisers and multilateral institutions play in that undertaking. Describing the “field” in this fashion reveals that the glue that holds together a set of disparate activities by disparate actors (for under what other circumstances do we assume common ground between family and securities lawyers, or professors and world bankers?) is a shared belief in the virtue of law.