ABSTRACT

Rule of law (ROL) practitioners note a surprising lack of attention to the empirical question of whether and how legal development works. This is true even in core areas like the institutional development of courts and the judiciary (Jensen and Heller 2003). Additionally, development approaches of international financial institutions (IFIs) like the World Bank (under its Comprehensive Development Framework or CDF), or bilateral development agencies like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), typically seem informed more by independent policy positions or normative ideology.1 Meanwhile, as attention has shifted toward the software exercise of capacity-building under policy-based lending, views of “development,” as opposed to “legal development,” have in many ways collapsed modern legal development into the whole development concept.