In June 2008, a ‘blue ribbon’ Commission issued a report claiming that ‘four billion people around the world are robbed of the chance to better their lives and climb out of poverty, because they are excluded from the rule of law’. According to a report in The Economist, the Commission had difficulty, over its three years of work, reaching consensus on how precisely ‘the rule of law’ would ‘empower’ the poor. Nevertheless, the articulation of the problem in this form commanded unanimous support. A month later, the press release of an equally high-level ‘World Justice Forum’ in Vienna announced its participants' ‘collaborative programs to strengthen the rule of law and thereby solve problems of corruption, violence, sickness, ignorance and poverty in their communities’.

Whatever else we might think about these two proclamations, they feel firmly anchored in a certain zeitgeist. The claims appear both breathlessly novel and yet somehow already on the cusp of anachronism. They seem tense and stretched: extraordinarily broad in the scope of the challenges they address (poverty, ignorance, violence, corruption) and yet strangely narrow in their proposed remedy (something called ‘the rule of law’). They assume a kind of immanent agency: they are both oddly passive (who has ‘robbed’ and ‘excluded’ these people?) and exuberantly active (‘strengthen … and thereby solve’). Their evident hubris appears to derive from faith: the term ‘rule of law’ seems to play a magical, or at least talismanic, role in both pronouncements.