LAW & ECONOMICS WORKSHOP
presents
David M. Trubek
University of Madison-Wisconsin Law School
Beyond Self-Estrangement: Law and Development 40 Years On
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
4:10 - 6:00
Solarium (Room FA2) - Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
Noting that the 40th anniversary of the publication of Scholars in Self-Estrangement will occur next year, the author looks at the field of law and development during these four decades. In a preliminary report, he reviews the critique outlined in Scholars and the claim that its publication killed the field it was designed to save. While acknowledging that the field had lost momentum by 1980 he argues that the decline occurred not because of the article but because the field lost the support of development agencies before it could establish a secure place in the academy. Noting that the field revived in the late 1980s-early 1990s, he observes that conditions for law and development scholarship are much better today and there is a proliferation of research much of which has avoided errors pointed to in Scholars. This proliferation has enriched the field but at the price of fragmentation: the field has split into a number of “sub-disciplines” that do not always communicate with one another. The article scans the field in the 21st Century, noting the influence of new ideas about development which stress experimentation and local variation in policy. These, combined with a better understanding of the embeddness of local legal systems and the limits of legal transplants demand more attention to local context and variation. Looking to the future, the author concludes that if law and development is to produce useable knowledge the separate aspects of the field should be better integrated, more attention paid to local variation and context in law and policy, research capacity in the Global South enhanced, and North-South communication improved.
David M. Trubek is Voss-Bascom Professor of Law Emeritus and a Senior Fellow of the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A graduate of UW-Madison and the Yale Law School, Professor Trubek served as law clerk to Judge Charles E. Clark of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and as Legal Advisor to the USAID Mission to Brazil before entering the academy. He joined the UW Law School faculty in 1973 and served as Associate Dean for Research from 1977 to 1984. During this period he also was Director of CLRP, the Civil Litigation Research Project, which was supported by the US Department of Justice. In 1985 he founded the UW's Institute for Legal Studies which he directed from 1985-90. Professor Trubek was appointed as University Dean of International Studies in 1990 and became the founding director of the UW-Madison International Institute in 1995. After stepping down as Dean and Director of the Institute he was Director of WAGE from 2001 to 2004. He has taught at Yale and Harvard Law Schools, the Catholic University Law School in Rio de Janeiro and the FGV Law School in Sao Paulo and has been a Visiting Scholar in Residence at the European University Institute in Florence, the Fundacao Joaquim Nabuco in Recife, Brazil, the London School of Economics, and the Maison des Sciences de L'Homme in Paris. He received the Kalven Prize from the Law and Society Association and in 2002 was appointed Chevalier des Palmes Academiques by the French Government in recognition of his work on globalization. He has written extensively on international and comparative law as well as other topics in legal studies and has published articles and books on the role of law in development, human rights, European integration, the changing role of the legal profession, and the impact of globalization on legal systems and social protection schemes. He has also made contributions in critical legal theory, the sociology of law, and civil procedure. His most recent books are The New Law and Economic Development : A Critical Appraisal (with A.Santos) (2006) and Direito, Planejamento e Desenvolvimento do Mercado de Capitais Brasileiro 1965-70 (with Gouveia Viera and Sa) (2nd edition 2011) Currently, he serves as Principal Investigator of LANDS, the project on Law and the New Developmental State; co-PI of the project on Law and Development in Brazil in Global Context which is being conducted by the UW-Madison and the FGV Law School in Sao Paulo with support from the Brazilian Agency for Industrial Development and the Tinker Foundation; and co-Director of GLEE, the Project on Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies.
This workshop is co-sponsored with the Globalization, Law & Justice Workshop.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
