The past and future of law and development

In this focus feature, David Trubek and Michael Trebilcock present an assessment of the past forty years of the law and development movement and map the challenges that lie ahead. While law and development research today seems to be on more solid ground than it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is still at risk of facing a second demise. The recent revival of the law and development movement has been marked by a research agenda increasingly attuned to the importance of local context. On the one hand, contextualization has countered the ethnocentric analysis produced in the Global North and exported to developing countries in the 1960s. On the other hand, attention to context has caused a severe fragmentation of the academic dialogue, as the concern with adaptation to particular circumstances defies any attempt to somehow connect these research efforts in one single conceptual framework. The new generation of law and development scholars is thus left with the challenge of maintaining contextualization, while avoiding letting the movement break down into a ‘series of self-referential silos.’