Introduction

Since the end of the Cold War, the relationship between law and economic development has once again become a hotly debated topic among legal scholars and social scientists. Structural adjustment programs of the international financial institutions regularly tie their loans to the improvement of the legal system in general and of commercial and business laws to encourage foreign investment in particular. Nevertheless, legal academics have been relatively slow to engage in this new debate. There are several reasons for this: first, after an initial enthusiasm for law and development studies in the 1960s, the first so-called law and development movement was severely criticised by leading scholars involved in the movement. Secondly, the study of law in developing countries has been largely left to social and political scientists either because the legal systems of developing countries were regarded as too unsophisticated to merit serious analysis or because few lawyers were able to devote sufficient time to acquiring the extensive knowledge of culture and foreign languages that the analysis of foreign legal systems requires. Yet, with increasing pressure from donors and financial institutions, developing countries' governments had no choice but to continue the debate about law reform in the context of economic development in spite of often insufficient legal resources and limited local training capabilities.

This new Centre seeks to avoid the commonly made distinction between "black letter law" and socio-legal analysis. In a developing country context, a pure black letter analysis of legal rules without acknowledgment of the socio-legal and cultural context is quite obviously of limited benefit. However, socio-legal theory with little interest in crucial technical aspects of the law is in danger of operating in a black box. The new Centre seeks to combine a socio-legal framework with classical comparative and international law analysis and a focus on a limited number of areas of law reform. It takes an interdisciplinary approach. Academics involved with the Centre have a diverse background in disciplines such as law, economics, accountancy and development studies. The regional focus is on countries in the Asia-Pacific region, although comparative projects with countries in other parts of the developing world are also of interest to the Centre.

Last reviewed: 18 August, 2010