Development deficit and modern law's myth of origin

Beyond the recent debates of WTO development issues, the Doha failure in particular, this paper extends its critical enquiry to past law and development scholarship to reveal the intertwining relationship between the international trading regime and the development failure. The paper's examination of the development paradigm's evolution from an economic-growth-oriented to multi-dimensional framework indicates that law plays a key role in the development failure. Further analysis discovers that the development crisis lies in its self-sufficient legitimacy deficit where the developed, as the model of development, bears its own legitimacy and the developing are framed in the fate of catching-up. The paper argues that this self-sufficient development deficit can be further traced back to the Enlightenment's notion of progression that implies a constant return to origins. Through this origin-obsessive mechanism, while law's past determines its present through the power of precedent in the system of modern law, the present of the developed as the development model determines the future of the developing in the development paradigm. Through taking up the contemporary intellectual property issue in WTO compliance, the paper's examination of the impact of the WTO intellectual property regime on developing countries demonstrates how the intersection of development failure and modern law's myth of origin reveals itself in WTO compliance. Building on this finding, the paper proposes a jurisprudential reconstruction to break through the development impasse, and argues that a rethinking of the development paradigm at the same time must be a reconstruction of the contemporary jurisprudence. © 2008 The Berkeley Electronic Press. All rights reserved.