Legal Origins and the Tasks of Corporate Law in Economic Development : A Preliminary Exploration

This paper offers a preliminary roadmap for interrogating the Legal Origins school. Before focusing on Legal Origins, however, Part II will address a basic issue facing development efforts: the contractual and ideological restriction of policy choices available for the development of economic and legal systems. Part III then demonstrates how Legal Origins theory influences, and has the potential to further influence, the actual development of policy choices in international development. Given the actual and potential impact of Legal Origins theory' on policy choice availability, Part IV then examines specific concerns raised by Legal Origins, and a common theme in this section will be how corporate law functioned in successful developing economies in Northeast Asia, as compared to the claims of Legal Origins and the development policy prescriptions that have followed. There may always be room for methodological debate with respect to how advocates of a general theory such as Legal Origins should deal with particular cases that do not seem to fit the general model, but for questions of economic development policy East Asia's exceptional development performance suggests that a general theory ought to be able to explain the East Asian experience