LAW AND DEVELOPMENT MOVEMENT IN LIGHT OF CONTRADICTIONS OF LEGAL RECEPTION

The western Law and Development movement engaged in legal assistance to the socioeconomic development of the third world states as well as the postsocialist countries by the Western patterns includes two different stages, the first one continues about a decade and a half from the beginning of the 1960s, the second lasts approximately twenty years starting the beginning of the 1990s. The article provides a detailed consideration of the history and the achieved results, the content of the activities as well as the theoretical sources of the movement in the jurisprudence, the sociology and the economics. The Law and Development movement encourages and assists in the legal reception from the Western legal orders. Taking into account the distinction between the political and the doctrinal legal reception, the movement acts within framework of the former because it uses the legal regulations as an instrument for achievement of extra-legal purposes. Informed by this approach, the legislation serves the present-day policy whereas the law, which is a special social regulator establishing freedom in a social life, does not find a proper expression in the legislation, a statute compliant with the law is not the legislator’s reference point. Hence the political legal reception does not contribute to a successful legal development, establishment of legal values and the rule of law. This predetermines a failure of the Law and Development movement as a whole. The true outcome of the movement is an impulse of some kind to the further independent legal development in the interested recipient countries.

Dialectics of Philosophical Pillars of the Law and Development Doctrine

This article analyses the philosophical foundations of the Law and Development doctrine, which has been used as a practical tool since the 1950s in many countries in an attempt to improve their socio-economic conditions. Since the adoption of the UN Resolution on Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, most countries have been making efforts to achieve it. We emphasize two philosophical-legal traditions in Law and Development under consideration, which in many respects display antagonistic attitudes to each other: liberal legalism and the ideas of postmodernism philosophy, in particular, the ideas of post-development. The dialectics of this contradiction is revealed in an attempt by liberal legalism to spread itself beyond the western legal systems. Postmodernism, which has been influenced by left-wing political and legal doctrines (neo-Marxism), is aimed at taking into account the interests of local cultures and more equitable distribution of global public goods as a development priority. Following the logic of G. F. Hegel, the evolution of Law and Development can be presented as the spiral reflecting the interaction of law and development theories that began to unwind in the second half of the XX century and continues its upward movement to the present moment.