The law is a powerful instrument that shapes the lives of people in many ways. As such, legal reform is an important tool for making society more democratic and fair. This is why we need to study the process of reform and its effects in great detail – both in terms of its immediate impact on individual litigants, and its long-term implications for society as a whole. However, research on these issues tends to be rather patchy. This is because it can be difficult to distinguish between technical change, such as codification, and changes that have more indirect ramifications in society.
For example, it is possible that what begins as a technical change (for instance, stripping the Court of its jurisdiction) may give one group in society a convenient hook or formal excuse to advance its political objectives. This could be a consequence of the way in which structural change is announced, or the fact that it gives some party an advantage that it will probably lose when control of the political system inevitably switches hands.
Breaks in the law and development orthodoxy such as these are welcome, but they remain the exception. A large number of donors and international agencies continue to believe that top-down reforms supported by Western legal expertise are the best way to build the legal institutions for markets and democracy. Unfortunately, these agencies are usually unaware of the power of cultural context in determining whether legal reform is either beneficial or harmful, and they are rarely sensitive to the potential for conflicts between market-oriented reform goals that benefit an economic elite minority and democracy-oriented reform goals that help poorer communities.
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