Law and Development
Reading Group Syllabus
Professor Christine Desan
Professor Lucie White
Professor Duncan Kennedy
Professor Mark Wu
Pascal McDougall, Graduate Research
Reading Group Description:
Even the simplest exchange relationships depend on legal categories, like property, contract, agency, and tort. As political communities develop, they shape “market” relations in myriad ways: law defines what can be traded as a commodity, what counts as a medium, what forms of wealth can be claimed, alienated, and inherited, and how capital changes hands and crosses borders. In this reading group, we consider how a variety of economic development strategies are institutionalized in law. We compare how those approaches are conceptualized by economists and other experts and how international organizations have debated, contested, or enabled those approaches. We will pay particular attention to critical approaches to law and development. Prof. Duncan Kennedy and Prof. Mark Wu will be participating as faculty discussants in the reading group, as will Pascal McDougall, SJD research assistant, HLS.
Meeting Date and Location:
We will meet in Lewis 214B on the following Tuesdays, 5-7 p.m.:
Sept 12 & 26, Oct 17, Nov. 7 & 21, Dec. 5.
Meeting 1: Defining Development
World Bank & Development Research Center (China), China 2030 (2013), Excerpt on Middle-Income Trap.
Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence 1-15 (2016).
Meeting 2: The Politics of Postwar Development Theory
Walter Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, 1-16, 36-40, 46-58 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 3rd ed., 1990).
Myrdal, Gunnar., Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions 23-38 (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1957).
Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History ix-xxi, 83-135
(New York: Vintage Books, 2014).
James Cypher, The Process of Economic Development 312-345 (New York: Routledge, 4th edition, 2014).
Meeting 3: The New International Economic Order
UN General Assembly, Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, adopted on 1 May 1974.
Mohammed Badjaoui,Towards a New International Economic Order, Table of Contents, 97-115(UNESCO 1979).
Gilbert Rist,Chapter 9: The Triumph of Third-Worldism in The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith140-170 (London: Zed Books, 1997)
Meeting 4: The Debt Crisis and Structural Adjustment: The Birth of the Washington Consensus
James Cypher, The Process of Economic Development 613-637 (New York: Routledge, 4th edition, 2014).
Adam Harmes, Institutional Investors and Polanyi's Double Movement: A Model of Contemporary Currency Crises, 8:3 Review of International Political Economy 389-404 (2001).
Christine Desan, Hand-out on balance of payments disequilibria (2017).
John Williamson, What Washington Means by Policy Reform, in Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened?, John Williamson, ed. (Institute for International Economics, 1990).
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else 39-40, 43-44, 45-50, 52, 54-55, 56-57, 58-59, 61-62 (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast, Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England, 69:4 The Journal of Economic History 803-808, 828-832 (1989).
Meeting 5: Market Failures, Freedoms and Growth Theory: The “Post-Washington Consensus” as a Great Theoretical Moderation?
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom 13-34 (1999).
Dani Rodrik, Getting Institutions Right, CESifo DICE Report, 2/2004.
Joseph Stiglitz, Is There a Post-Washington Consensus Consensus?, in The Washington Consensus Reconsidered: Towards a New Global Governance 41-56, Narcis Serra and Joseph Stiglitz, eds. (New York, Oxford University Press, 2008).
Justin Yifu Lin, New Structural Economics: A Framework for Rethinking Development 13-37 (Washington, D.C.: IBRD, 2010).
Meeting 6: Dissidence from Outside the Consensuses: A Sample of Different Critical Approaches to Law and Development
Alice Amsden, The Rise of “The Rest” – Challenges to the West from Late Industrializing Economies 1-3, 5-9, 14-15, 17-19 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Roberto Unger and Zhiyuan Cui, China in the Russian Mirror, The New Left Review 78-84, 87 (1994).
David Kennedy, Some Caution about Property Rights as a Recipe for Economic Development, 1:1 Accounting, Economics, and Law 2-4, 7-9, 24-27, 32, 38, 55 (2011).
Daniel K. Tarullo, Beyond Normalcy in the Regulation of International Trade, 100:3 Harvard Law Review 546-550, 552-563, 566-570 (1987).
Lucie White & Jeremy Perelman, Essay: Can Human Rights Practice Be a Critical Project - A View from the Ground, 44 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 157-168 (2010).
Duncan Kennedy, Commentary on Anti-Eviction and Development in the Global South, in Stones of Hope. How African Activists Reclaim Human Rights to Challenge Global Poverty 41-50, Lucie White and Jeremy Perelman, eds., (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
Arturo Escobar, Post-Development, in The Elgar Companion to Development Studies 447-451, David Alexander Clark, ed., (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006).
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