Special Topics in Laws, Governance & Development 3: Courts, Justice & Development will focus thematically on the role of the courts and judiciary as a key component of governance reform in official development assistance.  It poses the overarching question: is judicial reform failing and, if so, what can be done to improve it?  It will critique the global and regional experiences of promoting the ‘rule of law’ in the ‘law and development’ discourse, otherwise variously called ‘judicial reform’ or ‘access to justice’ over the past fifty years.  It will showcase and compare the regional experiences in Latin-America, the post-Soviet CIS countries, and Asia-Pacific.  

The course will adopt a multi-disciplinary and political-economy perspective to interrogate the justifications for judicial reform against the available empirical evidence and the evidence of practice as case studied through the Asian Development Bank, AusAID and practitioners across Asia.  Additionally, it will focus on the challenge of evaluating development generally and judicial reform specifically, and provide a meta-evaluation of development practice.

At the end of the course, students will be deeply informed and able to analyse and argue critically about judicial reform as a key thematic focus of governance reform in international development.  More specifically, students will be able to:-

• critique the ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ of judicial reform;
• assess the global/regional experiences;
• evaluate the effectiveness of existing and alternative approaches;
• appraise the epistemological roles of empirical evidence and ideology in building development policy.

Class Participation (20%), 2 x Essays (4000 wds 40% each)

Intensive Delivery over 4 days

none

Completion of LAWS8001 Introduction to Law, Governance and Development is recommended but not essential.

Armytage, L 2012, Reforming Justice: a Journey to Fairness in Asia,  Cambridge University Press

A reading list will be provided in the Course Outline 6 weeks prior to the commencement of the course.

Student will require access to internet.