This chapter explores the scholarship and practice surrounding international law and development. As a field, law and development might be understood as theoretical in its essence: it revolves around the rise, diffusion, transformation, and disintegration of ideas, theories, concepts, and paradigms concerning law and social change. Political agendas, institutional constraints, as well as economic interests are all crucial to understanding the manner in which the law and development agenda has evolved. Development policy and practice have been crucially important to the generation of global governance norms. Law and development has become at once a source and repository of norms about the forms and functions of law, domestic as well as international, and a powerful counterweight to other sources of law in the international order.