Research & Scholarship

The WJP supports rigorous research that examines the contributions of the rule of law to various aspects of economic, political, and social development and sheds new light on how to strengthen the rule of law. The WJP scholarship program is co-chaired by Robert L. Nelson, the MacCrate Research Chair in the Legal Profession at the American Bar Foundation, and Margaret Levi, the Jere L. Bacharach Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington.

The Scholarship program is currently pursuing an ambitious research agenda studying the effectiveness of the rule of law in various domains of social life, the interdependencies among the institutional components of the rule of law, and the causal mechanisms by which the rule of law affects economic and political life.

Publications

The WJP has produced two scholarly volumes published by Routledge Press, Global Perspectives on the Rule of Law, which examines the relationship between the rule of law and economic, political, and social development; and Marginalized Communities and Access to Justice, a series of comparative studies on how marginalized groups obtain access to justice. Authors include world renowned Nobel Laureates James Heckman and Amartya Sen, and Professor Yash Ghai, a constitutional and human rights scholar who previously served as Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Human Rights in Cambodia.

The WJP and the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL) collaborated on a special edition of the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law published in September 2011 devoted entirely to institutional indicators. Coordinating with leading researchers and developers of major institutional indicator projects in the fields of governance, corruption, and access to justice, the special issue concluded a two-year effort to advance the world's knowledge on measurement of the rule of law.

The WJP, in partnership with Morocco’s Mohamed V University, published papers in the University’s academic journal Horizons that discuss access to justice, exploring the political, social, economic, and cultural issues related to rights and justice in correspondence to the WJP’s Middle East and North Africa Regional Rule of Law Conference 2010. The purpose of these papers is to inform scholars, policymakers, civil society leaders, and other interested persons about the rule of law in the MENA region, and advance reforms. 

For a full archive of the WJP publications click here.