I’m writing a book. It’s about Law and Human Development in particular, and about international development—both the condition and the profession—more broadly. One of the central themes is this: law is, at its core, a social compact. It doesn’t descend from on high nearly as often as donors and the development industry would like to beileve. More often, it bubbles up from the ground—out of wet markets, churches, fishing villages, informal bargains, and the everyday places where people actually live their lives.
As part of the research, I’ve gone back through the record that exists of my own experiences in the places where law lives. For me, that record sits mostly in my photo files—projects, places, dates, people—each image tied to whatever I was feeling when I pressed the shutter. Many of you know that taking pictures is one of the ways I connect.
So as I write about bottom-up law, I’ll share some of those images and the stories behind them.
The first set comes from time I spent in Myanmar’s Chin State. Remote as it is, you can’t miss the hundreds of churches that look strikingly like early 20th-century rural American churches. There isn’t much written on the legal social compacts that emerged out of the missionary era, but the influence is unmistakable. Missionaries carried with them—and often explicitly promoted—American-style common-law norms they saw as aligned with Christian life. In doing so, it eventually evolved with the unique character of Chin itself. Still, many of the behaviors that still bind communities in Chin would look vaguely familiar to today’s rural American churchgoers, long after the missionaries themselves disappeared.
That has less to do with religion than with the enduring strength of a social compact born in community.
“Law is the enterprise of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules.” — Lon Fuller
A rulebook imposed from above rarely achieves that. A social compact forged from within often does.