Adam Smith stated in his Lectures on Jurisprudence that “the imperfection of the law and the uncertainty in its application” was a factor that retarded commerce.
[1] Max Weber, a philosopher of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, explained the importance of “rational” law in economy and society.
[2] Friedrich Hayek, a prominent London School of Economics and University of Chicago economist of the twentieth century, studied relevant legal concepts to support liberty as the prerequisite for development.
Scott Newton has argued that, "It [law and development] does not appear to possess a particular normative armature or notable thematic consistency or much of a unifying logic or set of organizing principles.
The interest in institutions revived with the collapse of socialism and the transition of the economies in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and China to capitalism.
This experience has been diverse, ranging from rapid growth in China and Poland, to a sharp decline followed by recovery in Russia, to stagnation with limited reform in Belarus and Uzbekistan.
Although it is now clear that the absence of reform, as in the Ukraine and Cuba, is associated with both economic and political stagnation, the emphasis on speed turned out to be excessive.
The academic research for the report was done jointly with Harvard University professors Edward Glaeser, Oliver Hart and Andrei Shleifer.