Description
Law and Development emerged in the United States in the 1960s and rapidly spread throughout the world. Its intellectual origins can be traced back to the boundless confidence of some American legal academics about the possibilities of achieving democratic change in developing countries through legal means. Financial assistance from the US government and US-based foundations enabled the launch of scores of ambitious research projects and the rapid growth of legal education programmes in the newly independent states of Asia and Africa, as well as in several countries in Latin America. Thus, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the number of academic lawyers with direct knowledge of developing countries grew, the Law and Development movement was recognized as an important new trend in American legal education.
During the 1960s Law and Development had a crucial impact on lawyers and law schools in a variety of countries, including Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Chile, Perú, and Colo