Between universalism and relativism: Reflections on the evolution of law and development studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper traces the evolution in thinking among scholars and development agencies with respect to the relationship between law and development in the post-war period, in the context of the rise and fall of universal themes of development. For much of this period, universal theories of development prevailed, beginning with various versions of modernization, state-led theories of development that prevailed in the first three post-war decades and that often yielded disappointing outcomes. These were supplanted by in many respects the converse policy prescriptions: neo-liberal (‘Washington consensus’) policies that emphasized the role of markets and the limited capacity of governments in developing countries. These policies also often yielded disappointing outcomes. This perspective in turn was largely displaced in the 1990s by an emphasis on the role and quality of institutions in developing countries as a major determinant of their development prospects but, like prior universal theories of development, came to recognize, in the light of the mixed to poor record of donor-supported institutional reforms in many developing countries, that there is no general blueprint for the design of political, bureaucratic, and legal institutions in developing countries. The paper goes on to argue that while rejection of universal theories of development is generally to be welcomed, there are dangers in succumbing to an extreme form of relativism where each country ‘must write its own history.’ These dangers are illustrated by reference to the evolving and sometimes inconsistent views of two prominent law and development scholars – David Trubek and Brian Tamanaha – with respect to the role of the rule of law in development.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.054 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.194 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.047 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".