1. What is the context for the study of expert ignorance in rule of law reform?
Chapter 2 presents the field of rule of law reform as the context for the study of expert ignorance. It argues that a range of transnational legal scholarship could productively focus not just on the meaning of key legal concepts as they circulate transnationally but also on how they are made meaningless. Thus, for some rule of law experts, the rule of law is underdetermined in a radical way. Analysing the scholarly and practitioner literature on rule of law reform, it shows that expert ignorance is meaningfully widespread in the field. It contrasts this view with that prevailing in the literature on rule of law reform, which imagines that rule of law experts seek to derive their authority from their knowledge about how to do rule of law reform, leading to effects like the poor transplantation of laws and institutions. It also introduces some of the stylistic and methodological problems this question raises and points to its responses: fictionalised and plurivocal reflections on my rule of law reform work. This entails a particular form of authorial presence that reflects who I understand a rule of law reformer to be -someone who can tell enough of a story to bring the reader along while fragmenting, shifting, and making fragile the story, the author, and her authority. This sets the stage for the methodological and empirical exploration of expert ignorance in the following chapters.
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