The Law and Development Movement (1960–2025): Activities, Assumptions and a Personal Assessment

At our first meeting of this semester club member Ted Parnell, Dean Emeritus of the UNM School of Law, will discuss the work he and others have done on law reform efforts in the developing world. Ted is an internationally renowned expert on this interesting and extremely complex topic.

Ted’s presentation is on Tuesday, November 11 at 5:30 pm in Physics, Astronomy and Interdisciplinary Science (PAIS) Building room 2540.  Following Ted’s talk we will have our social and dinner at Mario's Pizzeria & Ristorante (San Pedro & Uptown). The social hour and dinner will be a no-host event, so no need to prepay.

ABSTRACT

The Law and Development Movement (1960–2025: Activities, Assumptions and a Personal Assessment

The Law Development Movement could be described as a post WWII effort to build a rules-based international order by offering assistance to governments as they built or attempted to strengthen their law-related institutions such as courts, prosecution offices, law schools and law-making bodies. The effort was supported both by private organizations such as the Ford Foundation and multilateral and bilateral development agencies such as e.g., The World Bank, the United Nations Development Program, USAID (US), SIDA (Sweden), DANIDA (Denmark), JICA (Japan).

The effort began with an initial phase (roughly 1950-1975) filled with enthusiasm, optimism and (likely unwarranted) high expectations for progress not only in law but also in social and political sectors. During the Cold War years, the movement evolved into a more focused second phase (1975-1993) that was limited almost exclusively to economic and commercial legal issues and basic legal infrastructure. The third phase (1993-2021) saw an expansion of programs supporting a broad array of issues that attempted to bring rapid social and political changes that went far beyond very limited economic/commercial concerns.

Professor Emeritus Parnall, a 21 Club member since the early 1970s, participated in these efforts for almost 60 years, up until August 2021 when the US abruptly ended its efforts to transform Afghanistan, and then substantially eliminated law, as well as many other, development projects in 2025.

The presentation will not be a formal discussion of the pros and cons of the Law Development Movement intended for specialists on the topic but will focus on his experiences during a number of assignments in several countries in Africa and Asia.

He was in President Tubman’s pre-war Liberia in 1967 (funded by the Ford Foundation), in Addis Ababa (again for the Ford ) when the revolutionary “Derg” ended Haile Selassie’s 45 year reign in 1974, in Cairo (again for Ford) when President Sadat made his historic trip to Israel, still in Cairo during the 1977 bread riots, in Tunis during the Couscous riots of 1983, in Laos (for the World Bank/UNDP) when President (formerly Prince) Souphanouvong and the Lao government adopted its Constitution in 1991, in Beijing (for UNDP) several weeks after the Tiananmen Square riots. in Hanoi (for UNDP) during its transition to a market economy and in Jakarta (for USAID) during the final years of the Suharto Administration. His last projects were for USAID in Kabul.

Drawing on almost six decades of experience in societies undergoing stress and sometimes violent change, the presentation argues that while the movement seriously overreached especially in its first and third stages, its contributions to legal education, professional training, institutional transparency and the introduction of market-oriented laws and regulations may be enduring. It suggests that while the “grand project” of law-driven development may have ended, the movement nonetheless contributed to global transformations that raised living standards for millions.

The broad lesson, however, is that law should not be expected to serve as a quick shortcut to social transformation but rather must be understood as an evolving framework requiring cultural legitimacy, sustained resources and committed stewardship.