Beyond Law And Development

The book highlights new imaginaries required to transcend traditional approaches to law and development. The authors focus on injustices and harms to people and the environment, and confront global injustices involving impoverishment, patriarchy, forced migration, global pandemics and intellectual rights in traditional medicine resulting from maldevelopment, bad governance and aftermaths of colonialism. New imaginaries emphasise deconstruction of fashionable myths of law, development, human rights, governance and post-coloniality to focus on communal and feminist relationality, non-western legal systems, personal responsibility for justice and forms of resistance to injustices. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of development, law and development, feminism, international law, environmental law, governance, politics, international relations, social justice and activism.

Previous efforts at legal development have focused almost exclusively on state legal systems, many of which have shown little improvement over time. Recently, organizations engaged in legal development activities have begun to pay greater attention to the implications of local, informal, indigenous, religious, and village courts or tribunals, which often are more efficacious than state legal institutions, especially in rural communities. Legal pluralism is the term applied to these situations because these institutions exist alongside official state legal systems, usually in a complex or uncertain relationship. Although academics, especially legal anthropologists and sociologists, have discussed legal pluralism for decades, their work has not been consulted in the development context. Similarly, academics have failed to benefit from the insights of development practitioners. This book brings together, in a single volume, contributions from academics and practitioners to explore the implications of legal pluralism for legal development. All of the practitioners have extensive experience in development projects, the academics come from a variety of backgrounds, and most have written extensively on legal pluralism and on development.

This intriguing collection of essays by David Nelken examines the relationship between law, society and social theory and the various ideas social theorists have had about the actual and ideal 'fit' between law and its social context. It also asks how far it is possible to get beyond this mainstream paradigm. The value of social theorising for studying law is illustrated by specific developments in substantive areas such as housing law, tort law, the law of evidence and criminal law. Throughout the chapters the focus is on the following questions. What is gained (and what may be lost) by putting law in context? What attempts have been made to go beyond this approach? What are their (necessary) limits? Can law be seen as anything other than in some way both separate from and relating to 'the social'? The distinctiveness of this approach lies in its effort to keep in tension two claims. Firstly, that social theorising about legal practices is vitally important for understanding the connections between legal and social structures and revealing what law means and does for (and to) various social actors. The second point is that it does not follow that what we learn in this way can be assumed to be necessarily relevant to (re)shaping legal practices without further argument that pays heed to law's specificity.

The book examines the theory and practice of law and development. It introduces the General Theory of Law and Development, an innovative approach which explains the mechanisms by which law impacts development. This book analyzes the process of economic development in South Korea, South Africa, and the United States from legal and institutional perspectives. The book also explains why the concept of "development" is not only relevant to developing countries but to developed economies as well. The new edition includes five new chapters addressing the relationships between law and economic development in several key areas, including property rights, political governance, business transactions, state industrial promotion, and international trade and development.

This book addresses critical questions about how legal development works in practice. Can law be employed to shape behavior as a form of social engineering, or must social behavior change first, relegating legal change to follow as ratification or reinforcement? And what is legal development's source of legitimacy if not modernization? But by the same token, whose version of modernization will predominate absent a Western monopoly on change? There are now legal development alternatives, especially from Asia, so we need a better way to ask the right questions of different approaches primarily in (non-Western) Asia, Africa, the Islamic world, plus South America. Incoming waves of change like the 'Arab spring' lie on the horizon. Meanwhile, debates are sharpening about law's role in economic development versus democracy and governance under the rubric of the rule of law. More than a general survey of law and modernization theory and practice, this work is a timely reference for practitioners of institutional reform, and a thought-provoking interdisciplinary collection of essays in an area of renewed practical and scholarly interest. The contributors are a distinguished international group of scholars and practitioners of law, development, social sciences, and religion with extensive experience in the developing world.

As resistance mounts to the still dominant but clearly bankrupt ideology of neoliberal globalisation and the poverty, inequality and corruption that characterises it, this book explores contemporary understandings of the relationship between law, development and social injustice. In a legal context, and primarily in relation to the now well-established field of ¿law and development¿, the book¿s central aim is to address the limits of the concept of development in all its forms: including post-development, alternative development and sustainable development. How should we understand development and social injustice in a period marked by financial, economic, political and ecological crises? With contributors that include internationally renowned scholars in law and development, contemporary thinkers, and a new generation of academics working in the UK, South Asia, Africa and elsewhere, this book offers an important interrogation of why the concept of development is widely considered to be problematic, and the need to think beyond it.

The form of graffiti writing on trains and walls is not accidental. Nor is its absence on cars and houses. Employing a particular style of letters, choosing which walls and trains to write on, copying another writer, altering or destroying another writer's work: these acts are regulated within the graffiti subculture. Copyright Beyond Law presents findings from empirical research undertaken into the graffiti subculture to show that graffiti writers informally regulate their creativity through a system of norms that are remarkably similar to copyright. The 'graffiti rules' and their copyright law parallels include: the requirement of writing letters (subject matter) and appropriate placement (public policy and morality exceptions for copyright subsistence and the enforcement of copyright), originality and the prohibition of copying (originality and infringement by reproduction), and the prohibition of damage to another writer's works (the moral right of integrity). The intersection between the 'graffiti rules' and copyright law sheds light on the creation of subculture-specific commons and the limits of copyright law in incentivising and regulating the production and location of creativity.

This book addresses a conundrum for the international development community: The law of development cooperation poses major constraints on delivering aid where it is needed most. The existence of a state with an effective government is a basic condition for the transfer of aid, making development cooperation with ‘fragile’ nations particularly challenging. The author explores how international organizations like the World Bank have responded by adopting formal and informal rules to engage specifically with countries with weak or no governments. Von Engelhardt provides a critical analysis of the discourse on fragile states and how it has shaped the policy decision-making of international organizations. By demonstrating how perceptions of fragility can have significant consequences both in practice and in law, the work challenges conventional research that dismisses state fragility as a phenomenon beyond law. It also argues that the legal parameters for effective global policy play a crucial role, and offers a fresh approach to a topic that is central to international security and development.