This blog post provides insights from what I have come to call the legal political economy perspective to critique the World Bank and neoclassical economics more generally. At the heart of what has been called the World Bank’s Third Moment in Law and Development is the claim that government involvement is necessary to eliminate “market failures” and promote both business development and social justice.

In contrast to the mainstream Law and Economics (L & E) approach, which informs the Third Moment, my position, derived from the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) tradition (and its historical ancestor, Legal Realism), is:

• Property is fundamentally a bundle of rights and thus property ownership at its core entails coercive power struggles between rivals and between owners and non-owners; coercion at its core.
• The interrelatedness of law and power relations (“If the program of Realists was to lift the veil of legal Form to reveal living essences of power and need, the program of the Critics is to lift the veil of power and need to expose the legal elements in their composition” (Gordon 1984, 109)). These power struggles over economic outcomes occur within the context of background laws that determine property, contracts, and torts.
• The notion of an economic seesaw in Hale’s framework with potential for instability in property and contractual relations.
• If the goal is to understand how legal structures shape power struggles then the question becomes how are the laws themselves to be determined? Following the CLS perspective, I would emphasize the role of ideational factors determining the intellectual underpinnings of neoliberal policies—factors that have consciously been created by the financiers of the L & E tradition.

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