CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Rule
of Law, Democracy and Plunder
22 Corporate Crime Reporter 26, June 27, 2008
Here in the belly of the beast, Washington, D.C., a few key words have an approval
rating approaching 100 percent.
Democracy.
Transparency.
Human rights.
Rule of law.
Who could argue against them?
It’s like arguing against motherhood.
Or apple pie.
Now come Ugo Mattei, a professor of law at Hastings College of Law, and Laura Nader, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.
They have written a book – Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal (Blackwell Publishing, 2008).
Rule of law has such a sacred place in our society that the title is a bit discombobulating.
Wait a second.
These people are saying bad things about the rule of law?
What’s the alternative – anarchy?
Well, actually, yeah.
But not in the sense of anarchy that we here in the USA understand it.
The way we understand anarchy is – absence of the rule of law.
The law of the jungle.
But there is a different meaning to anarchy.
That would be localized, people centered law.
Rule of law as if people mattered.
That would be a foreign concept to us here in the USA.
Mattei and Nader are going after rule of law writ large – as in – what the big corporations and governments use to impose their will around the world.
To plunder the world’s resources.
And that’s what they mean when they say – when the rule of law is illegal.
When it is used as a sword to plunder.
Mattei splits his time between the Hastings in San Francisco and Turin, Italy, where he has been the driving force behind the creation of the new International University College of Turin.
Mattei sees the college as the anti-Chicago School for law and economics, and politics, and anthropology. He’s assembled some heavy hitters to be on his faculty – including Harvard’s Duncan Kennedy and Amartya Sen and Yale’s Guido Calabresi.
Mattei’s idea is to bring students from around the world to study global capitalism from the ground up.
Rule of law as if people mattered.
Earlier this week, we reached Mattei in his office in Turin, Italy.
“Rule of law is a poorly defined concept,” Mattei said. “Nobody really knows what it is. But it is considered a good excuse for any sort of activity that otherwise would not be decent. When the activity is covered by rule of law rhetoric, it suddenly becomes acceptable.”
“There are quite a few distinguished scholars right now that would be prepared to say – okay, colonialism was not a good thing to do,” Mattei said. “However, the result was that in certain places the rule of law was left behind, and therefore it was worth the kind of behavior practiced under colonialism – it was worth the plunder.”
“There is a very well-known legal scholar in the United States – Niall Ferguson. He’s at Harvard. He writes in the New York Times. He says – okay, imperialism was a bad thing, colonialism was a bad thing. However, you know, we left to India the rule of law, therefore India is better off than it would have been otherwise. We consider that an extremely arrogant attitude of the West that in some sense sees itself, its model, its ideology as something that is good for everybody worldwide.”
But there is good rule of law and bad rule of law, right?
“The rule of law is like Santa Claus,” Mattei says. “It doesn’t exist as such. It’s an undefinable mirage. It’s an imaginary figure.”
But laws actually exist. And together they form a rule of law, right?
“No,” Mattei shoots back. “Rule of law means – our own laws are the only ones meant to be considered laws. Laws exist in every kind of situation. In remote Sudan, laws exist. Even when there are no lawyers, laws exist. Even when there is no professional legal system, laws exist. But rule of law is used as a way to say – either you have laws that look like our own professionalized law of the West, based on property rights, contractual freedom – this kind of stuff – or you lack the rule of law.”
“How many articles and books are out now arguing that China lacks the rule of law, or Africa lacks the rule of law, or that we have to build the rule of law in Iraq, or that we have to build the rule of law in Afghanistan? It is as if there were no laws in those countries. It is as if there was nothing that was respectable enough to be considered law.”
“We argue in the book that this is the same strategy that has been used from colonial times into the present. The Indians don’t have private property, therefore they don’t have law, therefore they are not civilized, therefore we can plunder their land. We can occupy it because the people living there have no law.”
Mattei says that at the new school he’s creating in Turin, which holds its first classes in October, rule of law will be a central topic of discussion.
“Rule of law has a big reputation, but a poor pedigree,” Mattei says.
[For a complete transcript of the Interview with Ugo Mattei, see 22 Corporate Crime Reporter 26, June 30, 2008, print edition only.]
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