Experimental Justice Reform: Lessons from the World Bank and Beyond

Rule of law orthodoxy—legal transplants from high- to low-income countries—has endured despite persistent critiques. A key reason for this, we argue, is the absence of positive theories of praxis that can instantiate essentially contested concepts such as rule of law. We discuss the emergence of one nascent alternative, the World Bank's Justice for the Poor program, locating it within broader turns to experimental approaches to development. In doing so, we argue that rule of law reform must be understood in the context of the politics of the relationship between development experts and the domestic political forums in and through which rules systems emerge. As such, a primary task of external agencies is to help forge and sustain such forums, to recognize the deep imbrication between the process norms of these forums and the nature of the rule of law being produced, and to ensure that the empirical foundations on which ensuing deliberations rest are both sound and accessible. We conclude with an exploration of the challenges of this approach, from methodological challenges in building an empirical foundation to political accountability concerns with respect to rule of law reformers themselves.