Footnote:
In: Cornell International Law Journal, Vol. 48, 2015 (Forthcoming)
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments January 12, 2015 erstellt
Description:
Collective inquiry is underway, in the United States and around the world, into relations between legal and neoliberal thought and practice, or “neoliberal legality”. Scholars in a number of jurisdictions are exploring what demands neoliberalism might make of law and lawyers and how legal norms, institutions and practices might express, or call into question, neoliberal precepts. This article contributes to this inquiry through attention to one particular characteristic of neoliberal experimentation in the development field: the propensity of neoliberal experiments to “fail forward”. That is, the failure of development projects to realize transformative promise with which they were explicitly invested has not tended to impede subsequent projects from proceeding on more or less unchanged policy premises. The claim of this article is that a particular, modular understanding of law, of a kind propagated in the influential writings of economist Milton Friedman (as well as elsewhere), has been critical to neoliberalism's maintenance of forward momentum through such instances of apparent failure. Description of the legal regimes surrounding two hydropower development projects undertaken in the past decade in the Mekong River Basin in the Lao People's Democratic Republic in Southeast Asia will be put forward in support of this contention. In this setting, forward failure has also been maintained, this article shows, through the productive intertwining of neoliberal reform agendas and the politico-economic ambitions of a one party state