Law and development has a very long history. The export of legal reforms based on Western legal models to enable trade and commerce thrived in the colonial period. During the 1960s and 1970s the USA led a then ‘new’ law and development movement exporting American law, ostensibly to foster liberalism and democratic institutions, and forestall the spread of communism. Although the Cold War was essentially a contest between two economic systems and this first moment in law and development was highly ideological, it was arguably not immediately ‘concerned with any specifically economic functions of law. It reflected a broader, more socially than economically inflected, conception of the importance of law in modernization processes.’ After its robust critique, as a failed political experiment, and after the end of the Cold War, law and development was reclaimed and openly acknowledged as a strategy critical to the development of markets. By the 1990s law and development was ‘explicitly’ linked to market-led development, and later social ambitions were introduced. Concurrently, many donors adopted the rule of law as the focus of their projects, aiming to see legal systems reformed to include independent courts capable of protecting businesses and citizens from discretionary use of power.

The article poses the question and offers some indications of how best to support the enhancement of women's rights in the context of the plural legal environment in Somaliland today. Following a review of some externally-supported efforts to engage traditional justice concepts and actors and to enhance the ‘modern’ justice sector, the question is posed whether the meager results are the product of embedded ‘development’ assumptions. Where relevant parts of society are not willing to embrace women's rights, neither traditional nor formal justice institutions will deliver. If international development assistance and governments are to take the plunge into the world of the often complex local power structures and political economy they would detect that social norms are only marginally affected by formal legal institutions. Somaliland shows local societies and concepts overriding and conditioning the application of formal laws with no firm evidence that the prevailing state and judicial centric approach to Rule of Law development programming can actually translate, in the short and medium term at least, into more justice for women and positive socio-cultural changes as a whole. Attention is then called to the importance of women's own organizations and agency in charting a more effective way forward and to the need for more encompassing approaches to social change rather than narrow justice sector interventions.

Micro-enterprise is important to surviving or escaping poverty in developing country cities. Micro-entrepreneurs, informal in terms of business and commercial law, are stigmatized, rendered liable to legal enforcement, their access to credit is limited, and the growth of their businesses is impeded. As intensive international efforts today address business informality among larger enterprises, the business-law informality of micro-enterprise has begun to attract scholarly and professional attention. Drawing on a desk study and field studies in Tanzania in 2007 and 2011, and focusing on street vendors, this paper investigates the potential of proposed Legal Empowerment reforms to overcome barriers and disincentives to micro-business formalisation. The proposed reforms could go a long way towards addressing these barriers but, echoing criticisms of the Commission for Legal Empowerment of the Poor, the reform process has only partially addressed the political obstacles to the acceptance of the reforms and the micro-entrepreneurs they are expected to legitimate.

Most of the research on the rule of law in the European Union focuses on its external dimension. However, to be a credible rule of law promoter abroad, rule of law standards at home need to match what the EU preaches abroad. This article assesses developments regarding the strengthening of the rule of law in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice heralded in 2009 as one of the objectives of the Stockholm Programme. Two mechanisms had been envisaged. First, a new peer-review mechanism, based on a Dutch initiative, would be introduced. Second, ambitions to improve the monitoring culture of Justice and Home Affairs instruments found some support in the strengthening of the relationship between the Council of Europe and the European Union. Not only the negotiations on the EU's accession to the European Convention on Human Rights should improve the rule of law and mutual trust, but the EU could also better make use of the existing monitoring instruments of the Council of Europe. Inter-institutional tensions over the implementation of JHA policies, as well as turbulences surrounding the EU's accession to the ECHR have nonetheless come to light and are explored in this article.

This paper explores the rationale for development actors to become more engaged in its pursuit of providing support for mass, sustainable mechanisms, which increase access to justice for the majority of people around the globe. It does so by demonstrating the importance of the historical evidence demonstrating finance as the key hindrance to individuals' accessing justice. Finally, it sets out two emerging areas that would be worthy of further investigation and support by the development community but which have at present received scant to no attention by the vast majority of ‘rule of law’ or ‘justice reform’ efforts.

Livingston Armytage has news for the international aid community, most of it bad. Through extensive analysis, he confirms a chorus of critics who find little to show for hundreds of millions of dollars spent on judicial reform over the past two decades. He does not conclude that we have necessarily failed in our endeavors - although this does seem likely - but rather that we simply do not know if we are successful. Drawing on his insider experience as a reformer and reform evaluator, he suggests three reasons for this confusion: (1) we don't know what we're doing, both as a matter of goals and performance; (2) we don't know how to measure what we're doing; and (3) we usually don't bother to measure anyway, so we can't know what we're doing.