Scholarship

The World Justice Project has assembled two international teams of scholars to conduct rigorous original scholarship on the rule of law. The first team has developed a body of scholarship examining the relationship between the rule of law and economic, political, and social development. This team includes Nobel Laureates James Heckman and Amartya Sen, as well as legal scholars, political scientists and economists. To read the bios of these scholars, click here.

Cherie Booth Blair discusses access to justice issues as fellow panelists at the World Justice Forum take note.

The second scholarship team has conducted a series of comparative field studies on how marginalized groups obtain access to justice. The studies span diverse continents and cultures, including the Roma of Eastern Europe, nomadic herding peoples of Kenya, the Maori of New Zealand, and the urban poor of China. This team is led by Professor Yash Ghai, a constitutional and human rights scholar who previously served as Special Representative of the UN Secretary General in Camodia on Human Rights. To read bios of this team of scholars, click here.

The scholars presented their papers in a plenary discussion at the World Justice Forum. All the papers are now being prepared for publication in book form.

The research sponsored by the World Justice Project also inspired two other meetings of scholars, both in March 2008: one of political scientists at Yale University's MacMillan Center on empirical evidence regarding the rule of law, and a conference at the American Bar Foundation on "Lawyers and the Construction of the Rule of Law."