University of Texas Law School Conference (co-sponsored by USC-Cal Tech Center on the Study of Law & Politics).
Greetings from the Texas hill country. We are looking forward to our small conference on “the rule of law” coming up later this spring in Austin. We have approximately twenty leading scholars from across the country joining us to discuss the important question of how best to think about evaluating and perhaps even measuring the rule of law. This is a topic of growing interest in an era in which rule of law reformism is on the march and in which investments in exporting American-style rule of law institutions abroad rest upon assumptions and evidence about the qualities and performance of these institutions. We come, with apologies to Shakespeare, neither to praise nor to bury the rule of law, but to consider it afresh and with the benefit of able social scientists and legal scholars.