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Long cherished by liberal political philosophers, today the rule of law is increasingly viewed as a necessary requirement, or even silver bullet, for economic development. The past decade has seen the rise of a veritable industry�multilateral development banks, government development agencies, and nongovernmental aid organizations�committed to promoting the rule of law through legal and judicial reform in developing countries. This Article considers the emergence of a new rule of law orthodoxy within contemporary development theory and, in particular, the World Bank�s development model. It asks how and why the Bank has embraced the rule of law discourse, and offers a brief genealogy of the rule of law within the Bank�s theorizing. It argues that the Bank�s interest in law was primarily a response to the critique and failure of its neoliberal policies and identifies the new discourse�s affinities with the rise of New Institutional Economics and �good governance� in the 1990s. Under the Bank�s view, the law�s value for economic development lies in its ability to provide a stable investment environment and the predictability necessary for markets to operate. The role of law is reduced to the facilitation of utility maximizing exchange and optimal market allocation, a view that informs many of the Bank�s specific law reform projects. More a rhetorical shift than a fundamental break in development theorizing, the Bank�s turn to law actually undergirds many continued neoliberal assumptions and masks a continuation of neoliberalism�s core tenets. The new discourse is attractive precisely because it provides strong ideological support for the neoliberal agenda.
