Law Commons^™

Global Law And Plunder: The Dark Side Of The Rule Of Law, Ugo Mattei, Marco De Morpurgo

Bocconi Legal Papers

The ‘rule of law’ has traditionally been conceived as an intrinsically positive and politically neutral ‘tool’, universally valid and capable of being ‘exported’ everywhere. This paper—which represents a synthetic exposition of the ideas expressed in Ugo Mattei and Laura Nader, Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal (Blackwell Publishing, Oxford 2008)—asserts that such an ambiguous concept has a bright and a dark side, the latter being excluded from any public discussion. The rhetoric of the ‘rule of law’ has been used by Western powers in order to justify interventions (mainly) into the ‘developing’ world, that ultimately turned into practices …