The checkered history of rule-of-law promotion is only one part of a larger program of external intervention that has aimed to reshape economic policies and political institutions throughout the post–Cold War world. Those efforts—labeled good governance, state building, and postconflict intervention—have, if anything, intensified and broadened since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This dispassionate and valuable evaluation of rule-of-law promotion reflects directly on the record of international assistance for legal reform, as well as the likely success of that even more ambitious agenda. Two introductory essays by Thomas Carothers, well known for his research on democracy promotion, offer a critical account of international assistance for legal reform, emphasizing the knowledge deficit that plagues claims of successful international influence. The following chapters attempt to fill that knowledge gap, at the same time underlining obstacles to sharper evaluation and learning on the part of donors and practitioners.

Just as the Washington consensus in economic policy expanded from a pragmatic short list of recommendations centered on macroeconomic policy to a broader, politically useful, and rigid vision of market reforms, so the agenda of legal reform has produced its own rule-of-law orthodoxy. Questioning that orthodoxy is the task set for the second, and most successful, portion of this work. Rachel Kleinfeld's target is conceptual confusion: the melding of several, sometimes conflicting, definitions of rule of law in this capacious term. Rather than examining the ultimate ends implied by rule of law (ranging from a government bound by law to simple law and order), she finds that practitioners have too often lapsed into narrowly defined reforms of individual legal institutions, reforms that become ends in themselves. Frank Upham levels an even more telling critique of efforts to transfer Western or American legal institutions to other societies, pointing out that both the United States and Japan failed to fulfill many rule-of-law prescriptions during their successful economic development. Upham also notes that the leading industrialized democracies continue to display diverse legal institutions that do impede their political or economic success. Wade Channell describes the historical amnesia of legal reformers, who have seldom looked back at the law and development movement that rose and fell in the 1960s and 1970s. Channell also sketches the organizational and political reasons for a failure of learning among legal reform practitioners. In two chapters, Stephen Golub undermines the automatic relationship posited between legal reform, on the one hand, and economic development and poverty alleviation, on the other. His alternative to the existing orthodoxy—legal empowerment—appears as yet another orthodoxy, however, one that is close to the hearts of leading foundations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Its alleged superiority has been subjected to no more systematic evaluation than the prevailing orthodoxy.

Regional case studies, presented as a preliminary avenue of evaluation for international rule-of-law promotion, are generally less successful than these conceptual forays. Detailed narrative, careful assessment of the role of external influence, and unconventional conclusions mark Matthew Spence's outstanding account of criminal justice reform in Russia. Spence argues that a top-down approach to legal reform worked in the Russian case, but only because particular political circumstances permitted international donors to play a limited catalytic role. Matthew Stephenson provides a skeptical review of the “Trojan horse” assumptions that undergird support for legal reform in China. Legal reform in the interests of economic development could diffuse to other legal sectors, but the mechanisms for that diffusion are decidedly vague. Two other comparative accounts (David Mednicoff on the Middle East and Laure-Hélène Piron on sub-Saharan Africa) draw on their authors' experience in these regions, but give little means for evaluating that experience and the lessons that are drawn from it. Only Lisa Bhansali and Christina Biebesheimer attempt a more systematic, quantitative assessment of the significance of legal reform, and, as they freely admit, their analysis is wanting. Benchmark data is missing; the only outcomes that can be measured are very narrow ones (due process); and those outcomes cannot be causally related to larger social and political ends (of the kind that Kleinfeld urges). Most important for the task at hand, no clear estimate is offered of the influence of international intervention as compared to domestic variables.

In his brief conclusion, Carothers does not do full justice to these compelling criticisms of rule-of-law assistance. Legal reform is deeply political, not technical, and to pretend otherwise is a convenient fiction. That simple conclusion, shared by all of the authors, should, however, point to additional investigations that are missing here. The political prerequisites for successful legal reform are an essential precursor for understanding when and how to intervene. The authors divide, for example, over the value of a “top down,” state-centric approach or a “bottom up,” demand-creation effort based in civil society. Political context is certainly a key determinant of the efficacy of one approach or the other. In similar fashion, the ways in which reform in one part of the legal system may or may not reinforce or undermine change in other sectors is also shaped by the wider politics of legal reform. Local knowledge—both legal and political—is essential, and by the accounts of these authors, it is rare among practitioners. The authors, for the most part, avoid the simple panacea of more resources, emphasizing instead that politically astute delivery of legal assistance, rather than its sheer scale, will be more consequential. The need for more systematic and rigorous evaluation is urgently required—and it is far from clear that current assistance programs are framed with an ultimate goal of evaluation in mind. Finally, the authors describe, but cannot resolve, the overriding dilemma of all external assistance programs. Too much assistance of the wrong kind and local ownership of reforms is undermined; too little and reforms stall in the face of limited resources and political resistance.