Dr Nafay Choudhury

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time) and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has two principal objectives: (1) providing an advanced introduction to law and society approaches to legal scholarship; and (2) applying this approach to the notion of law and development.

The first two classes will focus on key concepts and debates in the respective areas of areas of sociolegal studies and law and economic development. The remainder of the course will be dedicated to specific discussions within law & society discourse with an eye for how they inform discussions on economic development and economic informality from below.

The following are some of the topics that will be covered during the course:

1. Theories, Concepts and Debates This session focuses on major concepts in the fields of “law and society” and “law and development”. Importantly, emphasis will be put on the rapprochement between the two, the benefits from such an interdisciplinary approach.
2. Empirical Approaches to Law This session introduces students to empirical approaches to the law, including qualitative and quantitative methods. In this way, students will be urged to expand their methodological toolkit when analyzing legal phenomena.
3. Institutions – What are they? Do they matter? Institutional development is a key discussion point within the law and development literature. Students will consider a variety of social, political and legal institutions and their role in economic development. Importantly, students will consider what a bottom-up versus top-down view of institutions would look like.
4. Rule of Law and Development The promotion of the rule of law has become a tenet of the new law and development movement, where law and rights are viewed as having intrinsic rights in themselves. Students will consider empirical and ethnographic approaches to the rule of law and reflect on what that means for opportunities and challenges for development.
5. Legal Transplants One of the key approaches to promoting to economic development has been the use of legal transplants for social reengineering. The session will focus on selected case of legal transplants, highlighting successful cases, the myriad criticism levied against transplants, and reasons for their continued use for economic development.
6. Property Rights, Contracts, Development Private law rights (property and contract) are sometimes viewed as essential for development. This session will look at the merit and critiques of such understandings, highlighting informal, nonstate arrangements that people devise from the bottom up that may affect such rights.
7. Varieties of Social Order with and without States This session focuses on the notion on the different, multiple and overlapping forms of social order that may exist within a social environment. Students will be urged to think beyond statist law by considering form of social and legal ordering that exist independent of state institutions.
8. Law Without Courts Much of economic life – in the global South and North alike – functions outside of state courts. Students will thus consider how nonstate legal mechanisms may contribute to development.
9. Colonialism Law, and Custom The legacies of colonialism run deep in many societies in the global South. This session will zoom in on a few select case students of countries dealing with the legacies of colonialism and how that has affected their experience of development.
10. Conflict and Law This session seeks to show how certain forms of social order, such as pirates and prison gangs, may undermine state institutions. Students will reflect on how nonstate forms of ordering may bear certain costs.

20 hours of seminars in the WT. 2 hours of seminars in the ST.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the WT.

• Macaulay, Stewart. 1984. “Law and the Behavioral Sciences: Is There Any There There?” Law & Policy 6: 149-187.
• Abel, R. L. 2010. “Law and Society: Project and Practice.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 6: 1-23.
• Tamanaha, Brian. 2001. A General Jurisprudence of Law and Society. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
• Trubek, David M. 1972. “Max Weber on Law and the Rise of Capitalism.” Wisconsin Law Review 1972: 720-753.
• Scott, James C. 1999. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Ellickson, Robert C. 1991. Order without law: How neighbors settle disputes. Harvard University Press.
• Carothers, Thomas, ed. Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge. Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 2006.
• de Soto, H. 1989. The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World. Harper & Row, 1989
• Cheesman, Nick. 2014. “Law and Order as Asymmetrical Opposite to the Rule of Law.” Hague Journal on the Rule of Law 6: 96-114.

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours and 30 minutes) in the spring exam period.