Some Aspects of the Present Discussion of Lawyers on the Place of Law in Development

Abstract

I put the stress on the present discussion of the place of law in development because I think there has been a sea-change since the 1970s. Then there was an attempt to change the whole international economic system through a restructuring of the legal institutions of international economic relations. The high point was the 1974 Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States passed by a majority in the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1974.¹ This was to have led to such radical change as the introduction of just prices for exports from developing countries, the democratisation of the IMF, and a completely free hand to expropriate the assets of foreign corporations, or otherwise to subject their operations to a complete national control. I think it is evident since the Thatcher-Reagan era that there has been no international consensus on any substantial measures of structural change in the international system. This general political change is reflected in the concerns of lawyers sympathetic to the economic problems of the Third World. These have now turned from the language of the law of a new international economic order to the language of the right to development.²