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The World Bank (the Bank) has supported legal reform in countries in all the major regions of the World-in countries with civil law, common law and Islamic law traditions, and in countries as disparate as China, the Comoros and the Czech Republic. The Bank has been in the business of supporting legal reform for nearly a decade, so it could be assumed that we have learned a great deal about the strategy and implementation of reform programs in that time.
It is interesting to reflect on the change that has resulted in the importance attached today to law and legal reform in the development process. In the early years of the Bank's existence, lawyers and legal change were seen as rather remote from the Bank's development objectives. In a 1962 letter written on the role of lawyers in the appraisal of Bank-financed projects, the Bank's Office of Information said:
We have never had a lawyer included on a mission because of his legal knowledge. You have probably noticed from the reports [of the various missions] that the effort of a mission is generally directed towards broad economic planning and programming and that consequently its depth is extremely limited in the more specialized and highly technical areas such as the development of the legal system of the country or the legal problems incident to economic development. This is not to say that men with legal backgrounds are never mission members, but rather that, if they have such background, it is only incidental to their other abilities.
Fortunately, things have changed. Today, it is widely acknowledged that governments must provide the institutional infrastructure that makes competitive markets work, and that the legal system is a key element of that institutional infrastructure. For example, in a recent report by the African Governors of the Bank, the Governors recognized that capacity inadequacies in the legal system as a whole pose major constraints to the development of capacity in the private sector. They proposed that:
A high priority should be given to a thorough reform of the legal system, including enhancing the local capacity to draft laws, providing support for the redrafting of legal codes, improving the judiciary, the capacity of State attorneys and private lawyers, and the capacity of...