This article sets out some ideas for a law in development research agenda that focuses on how law affects the life choices of poorer sectors of society This is not an effort to build a populist ‘people-centred’ research agenda. Rather, it is an attempt to construct an agenda that identifies, in a rigorous and systematic way, the causal mechanisms through which law actually influences how people invest their resources in productive enterprises to create wealth and in political enterprises to create voice. lt is impossible to construct such a ‘law-in-development’ research agenda without, if not an answer, at least an approach to finding an answer to the following question: how much does law really matter? That is, how much causal weight should we accord legal factors when explaining either large social outcomes or the economic and political decision making of ordinary people?
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