Publication

This paper examines the World Bank’s claims that it is ‘building’ or ‘promoting’ the Rule of Law (RoL) via legal and judicial reform. It seeks to identify the theory informing the Bank’s work. The primary argument of the paper is that the RoL is a social and political ideal. At the social level, it requires that the law is capable of guiding one’s behavior. The processes that allow this are extremely complex and scarcely understood. Moreover, evidence suggests that these processes are impervious to reform, respond only extremely slowly and ultimately dependent on the contested idea of ‘political will’.