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Defence date: 13 June 2019 ; Examining Board: Professor Stefan Grundmann, European University Institute (Supervisor); Professor Claire Kilpatrick, European University Institute; Professor Peer Zumbansen, Osgoode Hall Law School; Professor Simon Deakin, Cambridge University ; Over the last forty years, legal theory and policy advice have come to draw heavily from an 'evolutionary' jurisprudence that explains legal transformation by drawing inspiration from the theoretical successes of Darwinian natural selection. This project seeks to enrich and critique this tradition using an analytical perspective that emphasizes the material consequences of concepts and ideas. Existing theories of legal evolution depend on a positivist epistemology that strictly distinguishes the objects of social life—interests, institutions, systems—from knowledge about those objects. My dissertation explores how knowledge, and especially non-legal expertise, acts as an independent site and locus of transformation, mediating the interaction between law and social phenomena and acting as a catalyst of legal innovation. Prior work by Simon Deakin has integrated insights from systems theory to show how the interaction between law and economic institutions can only be properly understood by attending to the epistemic frame law uses to interpret economic practice. Using a case study on the impact of 'law and finance' literature on World Bank policy advice and, consequentially, on legal reforms adopted by many developing countries between 2000 and the present, I show that such attention to legal knowledge is inadequate. The case points, first, to the contingency of the intellectual tools used to understand legal institutions. Rather than deploying a determinate rationality, private and public actors address legal, economic, and ethical problems using a variety of paradigms: viewpoints are not determined by realities. More fundamentally, the cases suggest that successful paradigms, rather than economic or political realities alone, shape the dynamics of socio-legal change. My conclusions address some normative questions that arise when researchers in a social scientific mode are implicated in the processes they seek to document.

Published online: 9 December 2019 ; Domestic laws are shaped by myriad global governance projects, which may attract the support of different organizations, promote contrasting socioeconomic visions, and operate at diverse levels and scales.1 Beyond differences in their whos, whats, and wheres, governance projects are also differentiated by their hows: they may embody different ways of imagining relations between order, authority, and legitimacy;2 operate through different styles;3 or deploy different technologies.4 International legal regimes, which function through a logic of governance that applies norms sanctioned by the political consent of states, have long operated alongside "systems of management and control" drawing their legitimacy from claims of "objective, disinterested scientific knowledge."5 This essay explores how such "governance by knowledge"6 interacts with international law's "governance by norm,"7 through a case study of the World Bank's Doing Business project and the International Labour Organization (ILO)'s responses to it. I contend that Doing Business ultimately rests on "bad science,"8 and thus offers a potent illustration of the power wielded by actors who claim "technical" knowledge. I argue that those who fail to engage with the technicalities of the knowledge claims that ground projects like Doing Business, and who instead meet such projects primarily through the idiom of (international) legal normativity, may have already lost the battle for influence.