The Law and Development Research Network is now live

The Law and Development Research Network (LDRN) was launched on 22 September 2017 by nine founding institutions, including Warwick Law School.

Warwick Law School academics, Dr Sam Adelman, Emeritus Professor Abdul Paliwala, Dr Celine Tan and Dr Sharifah Sekalala all participated in the signing of the LDRN Charter, which took place at the University of Antwerp. As a founding member, Warwick Law School will play a key role in developing the network and organising activities and programmes under its umbrella.

Celine Tan, Director of the Law School’s Centre for Law, Regulation and Governance of the Global Economy (GLOBE), explains “This is an exciting new venture and one that has come together organically through formal and informal collaborations between the founding institutional partners and researchers within the network.”
The LDRN seeks to enhance knowledge and understanding of the role of law, both domestic and international, in relation to development and governance, as perceived globally and locally, and is therefore concerned with the social functioning of legal systems primarily in the context of countries in the Global South.

Celine adds “although the field of Law and Development has a long, varied and sometimes, contentious, history, the network seeks to bring together the rich traditions of scholarship and perspectives on development policy and practice that broadly comprise this unique interdisciplinary field.”

The network envisages that the LDRN community will engage in fruitful discussions from both orthodox and critical perspectives on the role of law in development. LDRN’s main objective is to support and connect its members who are involved in academic research and teaching in the interdisciplinary and multi-level field of Law and Development (L&D).

Participants identifying themselves as working on Law and Development are welcomed. The network especially encourages research activities that focus on the connections between law and development, notably on ways legal systems, i.e. its rules, actors and processes, contribute to or undermine global development and social justice.

Information on how to join the network will be publicised in due course but in the meantime, membership queries can be directed to: information@lawdev.org

Warwick Law School has a long and proud tradition of research, teaching and policy work on Law and Development and has been at the forefront of pioneering and critical Law and Development scholarship. We embed these perspectives not only within our specialised LLM programme on International Development Law and Human Rights (IDLHR) but also, where applicable, across our postgraduate taught programmes, including our LLM in International Economic Law (IEL), and in our doctoral programmes.

We will, particularly through the GLOBE Centre, and the Development and Human Rights Research Cluster, be actively engaged in developing and growing the network and we look forward to collaborations between our partners and other engagements within the network. As a starting point, Warwick Law School will be organising a conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania next September under the umbrella of the network and will be participating in the annual Law and Development network conferences.

Alongside Warwick Law School, the network was founded by the Faculty of Law, University of Antwerp; Law, and Global Justice Group, School of Law, University of Cardiff; Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Leiden University; Institute of Human Rights, Åbo Akademi; Faculty of law, Humboldt University; International Institute of Social Studies, Rotterdam; University of Austral, Buenos Aires; and School of Law, University of Tilburg.

For more information please visit the network website (currently still under construction.) https://lawdev.org/

Photo credit: University of Antwerp/Lani Fourie.