Let me add an observation to Walter's exellent message urging ALSBers to embrace both theoretically and practically  why law benefits economic development and business practice, thus asserting a critical foundation role for law in collegiate business study. Donald Clarke is dead wrong about China's not moving rapidly toward a commercial law system based on property and contract. It's just that China has a long way still to go.  Yet the areas of China that are booming are the ones where the government has either de jure or de facto privatized economic development, i.e., implemented private property as a legal concept. 



The Chinese authorities themselves now (a) largely keep their hands off private productive resources in the developing areas, certainly as contrasted with past government policy, and (b) will defend (police, etc) those private resources from private theft. That's what a system of private exclusive legal boundaries does, only this one has a Chinese face as we might expect. The reason private property as a legal concept energizes development is--as has been maintained since Aristotle--because it maximizes incentive to produce.



Minxin Pei, a China scholar at Columbia, has collected statistics on China's move toward a system of law. Here I quote Pei in 41 ABLJ 459 (2004), at fn 19: "The burgeoning Chinese economy has been accompanied by a corresponding growth in law, lawyers, and law degree programs. Testimony of Minxin Pei before the House International Relations Committee, FDCH Congressional Testimony, Apr. 30, 1998, available in LEXIS, News Group File ("Legal reform has become one of the most important institutional changes in China since the late 1970's."). The total number of lawyers tripled in China between 1986 and 1996, private law firms grew from seventy-three in 1991 to 2,655 in 1996, and between 1985 and 1996 "the rate of professional legal representation increased seven-fold in civil cases and 24-fold in criminal cases."  



Once again, in full agreement with Douglass North and Hernando de Soto, an enforced institution of law that supports private production in whatever resources society wants to produce more of is the goose that lays the golden wealth of nations. In the most self-aggrandizing way possible :), I invite you to consider a series of articles I've written on aspects of this subject over the past seven years. They are:



“Exclusive Private Property Is Indispensible to Brazil’s Economic Development,” International Journal of Economic Development, Vol. 8, pp. 5-10 (2006).



            “The Connection Between a Property-Based Legal System and National Prosperity:  Example from a Divided Germany Reunified” (with Florian Stamm), Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law,  Vol. 33, pp. 574-603 (2005).

 

            “What Is Property?” American Business Law Journal, Vol. 41, pp. 459-501 (2004).



	“Development of Market Democracy in Iraq”  Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law , Vol. 33, pp. 210-215 (2004).



	“Nationbuilding 101:  Reductionism in Property, Liberty, and Corporate Governance,” Vanderbilt Transnational Law Journal, Vol. 36, pp. 673-721 (2003).  



	

	“Law, the Rule of Law, and Property,” American Business Law Journal, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 441-473 (2001).