Law and Economic Development: The Cautionary Tale of Colonial Burma
نویسنده
چکیده
Burmese colonial history suggests that a legal system cannot operate independently from the felt needs of the people who are supposed to obey the law. Despite a monopoly of force for many decades, the British failed to create a sustainable legal system in Burma. Colonial status shifted Burma’s economic role from subsistence agriculture to the generation of large-scale exports. By undermining the traditional Burmese legal system and substituting Western international standards of property rights, enforceability of contracts, and an independent judiciary—all attributes of what some consider to be the “Rule of Law”—the legal system amplified and channelled destructive economic and social forces rather than containing them. This paper examines traditional Burmese law, the administration of law in British Burma, and the consequences of the new legal system for the country and its own stability. The paper concludes by suggesting lessons for Myanmar today, and for the study of the “Rule of Law.”
منابع مشابه
Culture Change
Introduction ............................................................................... 357 I. A Brief History of Law and Development ................................ 361 A. Law and Development After 9/11: Development as National Security............................................................. 361 B. Development as Human Rights ....................................... 365 II. Culture a...
متن کاملA Cautionary Tale of Post-Communist Judicial Empowerment
This article aims to curb the enthusiasm for post-Communist judicial empowerment by showing that sometimes a powerful judiciary can threaten the rule of law. It argues that the powerful Bulgarian Constitutional Court promotes conflict between the executive and the ordinary judiciary. The “war of institutions” has made Bulgaria the poster child for failed judicial reforms among new European Unio...
متن کاملA History of Company Law in Colonial Australia: Economic Development and Legal Evolution
[The history of Australian company law has attracted remarkably little attention in academic literature, perhaps because it has mainly been seen as a copy of English law with few, if any, noteworthy features. This article points out several interesting and significant aspects of the evolution of Australian company law and considers this evolution in the context of the economic development of co...
متن کاملbepress Legal Series
This article focuses on the question of how regulation can be best designed to encourage technological innovation. Most scholarship in this area applies standard economic analysis to evaluate the impact of various forms of regulation on technological innovation. We reject that approach as too narrow, drawing instead upon principles of evolutionary economics. The basic premise of the article is ...
متن کامل