What We Talk About When We Talk About Law and Development

This article describes how the authors understand Law and Development (L&D), and L&D teaching, based on their conceptual views, as well as on their practical experiences in the classroom. In light of Miola’s experience, it describes a possible purpose for L&D: that of influencing the minds of future development policymakers. This idea is presented in the description of a practical experience of teaching an L&D undergraduate class for nonlaw students. In such an environment L&D’s well-established emphasis on the imbrication of law and economic performance can help nonlaw students perceive and discuss the roles of law in the economy and development policies - the domains in which many of them will likely act as professionals. Based on Coutinho’s experience in teaching at a law school, it describes how researching and teaching L&D involves developing a lens (or a “technology”) through which the law can be seen (and eventually changed, in an institutional design exercise) as a tool to shape democratic arrangements devised to structure and implement development policies. The authors also highlight what they perceive to be common between these two relatively distinct research and teaching experiences, and discuss what they mean regarding their views about what constitutes L&D (and, once more, how to teach) it: Miola’s course seeks to shape a different “legal consciousness” of future development professionals who are not lawyers, so they can devise or deal with development policies without ignoring legal institutions, whereas Coutinho’s class, in turn, aims to enable law students to visualise their field of practice as a powerful “technology” to development to critically analyse and improve institutional arrangements, and hence of themselves as agents with a privileged position to operate it.