The World Justice Project

Scholarship

The World Justice Project has assembled two international teams of scholars to conduct scholarship on the rule of law. The first team has been asked to develop a body of original scholarship examining the relationship between the rule of law and communities of opportunity and equity. It will focus on questions of causality between the development of rule of law systems and various aspects of economic, political, and social development.

This team of scholars, led by two Nobel Laureates (Dr. James Heckman and Dr. Amartya Sen) and consisting of legal scholars, political scientists and economists, held a workshop in November 2007 in Chicago, Illinois to share information on their work and to receive input from colleagues in relevant fields.

The second scholarship team, led by Professor Yash Ghai, a constitutional and human rights scholar, is conducting a series of comparative field studies on marginalized groups and justice. Their work will result in new insights and understanding, both on the relationship between the rule of law and communities of opportunity and equity, and in regard to how marginalized groups access justice.

These scholars met in Washington DC in early March 2008 to share their work to date and solicit input from colleagues.

Participating scholars continue to research and write papers on the rule of law and its impact on communities from their areas of expertise. These papers will be published before the World Justice Forum and will be the subject of a plenary discussion there.

The research being conducted for the World Justice Project inspired two other meetings of scholars: one at Yale University's MacMillan Center on Democracy and the Rule of Law, held in late March 2008, and a March 21 conference at the American Bar Foundation on "Lawyers and the Construction of the Rule of Law."