Spotlight

What role can law play in developing countries? On September 11–12, 2009, Cornell Law School hosted scholars and professionals from international organizations for a conference focusing on this question.

Topics discussed at the conference included prospects for a comparative law analysis of development in the Middle East and North Africa, legal frameworks for the Islamic world, law and development in Palestine, a case-study of Egypt, and the “global city” as a paradigm for development.

“The meeting was very diverse and productive,” says professor of law Chantal Thomas, who directs the Clarke Initiative for Law and Development in the Middle East and North Africa. “The Palestine panel exemplifies one of the hopes of this program—to look at the region from a different perspective than the typical one that is used, which centers the Islamic identity and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as mutually and exclusively defining characteristics. Of course these aspects are important and remain central, but if we look only at them, we risk the reification of a certain ‘clash of civilizations’ discourse. We’re trying to look at these problems from fresh angles, through the lens of contemporary and classic problems of developing countries, in order to see what insights a law and development analysis might lend to these complex challenges. So far we’re finding a great appreciation for this approach, and at the same time discovering gaps in existing research.”