Comparative Law and Social Change: On the Origins, Style, Decline &amp; Revival of the Law and Development Movement

Merryman, John Henry

doi:10.2307/839690

Cited by 119 publications

(32 citation statements)

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“…Although it indulges purely theoretical debate (primarily in law schools), its orientation is pragmatic and applied-thus narrowing the range of topics lawyers will allow themselves to think about, but more accustoming them to the real-world impact of their decisions. Merryman (1977) observes that "[i]n a very general way it can be said that American legal scholarship is strongly action-oriented. The emphasis is on doing things.…”

Section: Paradigms In Conflict: the Divergent Methods And Stylesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychology and legal change: On the limits of a factual jurisprudence.

Haney¹

1980

Law and Human Behavior

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Law and Human Behavior.http://www.jstor.org From its inception, research in "law and psychology" has had an explicitly applied focus. In large part, psychologists have studied legal issues and participated as experts in the legal process in order to improve law and enhance the quality of its justice. This article examines whether and how this can be done. A taxonomy of relationships between the two disciplines is presented which characterizes law and psychology research in terms of its potential for legal change. The use of psychology to effect legal change requires a bringing together of both psychological and legal paradigms. But important differences exist between the styles and methods of reasoning, proof, and justification in psychology and law. The implications of those differences for the use of psychological data in legal change efforts are developed, as are other aspects of "legalism" that may hinder or impede the effectiveness of psychologically oriented law reform. Finally, limitations of a "factual jurisprudence" that derive from the nature of psychological data are examined.

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Section: Paradigms In Conflict: the Divergent Methods And Stylesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychology and legal change: On the limits of a factual jurisprudence.

Haney¹

1980

Law and Human Behavior

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“…Law and 'institutions' must, therefore, be researched and, even better, newly designed. While the older law and development movement of the 1960s was mainly confined to reordering legal rights and relations within states, and was driven by lawyers, the recent wave more strongly focuses on inter-and transnational legal relationships, and the set of actors involved is more varied (see Burgh 1977;Merryman 1977;Gardner 1980;Trubek and Galanter 1974). American, European and, in Indonesia, Australian 'law merchants' offer their technical legal support for drafting legislation and contracts, as well as their capacity as negotiators or mediators (see Dezaley and Garth 1995;Nader 1995;Silbey 1997;Rose 1998 In this context, much attention is given to changing economic conditions by facilitating the global flow of financial capital and investment opportunities.…”

Section: The New Boom In Law and Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal Pluralism and Social Justice in Economic and Political Development

Benda‐Beckmann¹

2001

IDS Bulletin

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Summaries Legal pluralism is an approach which accepts the possibility that, within any given polity, there can be more than one ‘legal order’ and that the state is not the exclusive source of legal regulation. Nevertheless, defining whether a particular claim or social relation is legally sanctioned is a highly political matter, since law determines rights over people and over economic resources ‐ land, forest, water and minerals. The experience of colonialism showed how state law could be used to deprive people of their land rights. Private property law during the European experience of industrialisation was used to justify exploitation of labour and relationships of social and economic inequality. On the other hand, one should not romanticise local or customary laws which may equally enforce the interests of oppressive local élites. The merit of the legal pluralism approach is, however, that it forces us to concentrate on the empirical reality behind slogans about the ‘rule of law’; we should always ask, what is the actual effect of a particular normative order — whether state or non‐state, public or private — on people's rights over essential resources and on their ‘access to justice’, in the true sense.

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“…A related belief was that law was an instrument that could be used to reform society and that lawyers and judges could serve as social engineers. As Merryman (1977) notes, not everyone subscribed to this view. A few participants in the movement argued that only minor changes could be effected through legal reforms, and others contended that law reform should follow broader changes in society, that is, that the proper aim of reform was to adjust the legal system to social and economic changes that had already taken place.…”

Section: The Law and Development Movementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The postmortems on law and development identify a number of pitfalls that advocates of judicial reform ought to bear in mind (Burg 1977;Gardner 1980;Merryman 1977;Trubek and Galanter, 1974). One is that the movement lacked any theory of the impact of law on development.…”

Section: The Law and Development Movementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the 1960s USAID, the Ford Foundation, and other private American donors underwrote an ambitious effort to reform the judicial systems and substantive laws of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This "law and development" movement engaged professors from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Wisconsin, and other leading law schools and within a few years had generated hundreds of reports on the contribution of law reform to economic development (Merryman 1977). Yet after little more than a decade, both key academic participants (Merryman 1977;Trubek and Galanter 1974) and a former Ford Foundation official (Gardner 1980) declared the program a failure, and support quickly evaporated.…”

Section: The Law and Development Movementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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