Law and development: Forty years after ‘Scholars in Self-Estrangement’

Abstract

‘Scholars in Self-Estrangement’ was a major milestone in the field of law and development. In a paper delivered in 2014 at the University of Toronto on the Fortieth Anniversary of its publication, the author looked back over four decades. He observed that the field was created in the 1960s as an adjunct of development assistance but soon sought to become an independent academic endeavour: seeking to make the field more academic, the article critiqued early efforts as too policy dependent and ethnocentric. But shortly after the article was published, law and development slowed down: it had lost support of development agencies before it could establish a secure place in the academy. Then, by the 1990s, it had revived, and today there is a proliferation of research, much of which has avoided the errors pointed to in ‘Scholars.’ However, the field has now split into a number of subdisciplines that do not always communicate with one another, despite the interdependence of different facets of development. To the challenge created by this fragmentation are added two other main concerns: new theories of development that stress experimentation and local variation, and the irreducible local embeddedness of legal systems. These suggest a need for greater emphasis on context for the definition of reform strategies and raise questions about the viability of general laws about the relation between law and development. Thus, the author notes here that the field now confronts the twin challenges of interdependence and context. Recognizing that there is no easy formula to meet these challenges, he concludes that building capacity in the Global South for interdisciplinary- and policy-oriented work is a necessary first step.