LAW OF SUSTAINABLE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
About the Graduate Program

International development issues have a significant place both in developing countries and in the industrialized democracies which provide them aid, trade, and investment. Many of these issues unfold amidst a complex web of national, comparative, and international legal problems. Although there has been significant progress since World War II, an estimated 13 to 18 million people in the developing countries die each year as a consequence of having insufficient food; 100 million agricultural families work on land owned by others and are among our planet's most disadvantaged citizens; and the population of the developing countries continues to grow more than 2 percent a year (versus 1/2 percent for the developed countries), creating unacceptable pressures on resources and environment. Further issues, involving creation of a market economy, confront an additional group of developing countries in transition away from communism. Important legal issues loom in crafting solutions to all of these problems and others affecting the developing countries. This LL.M. program is the first graduate program at a U.S. law school to focus on international development law. Enrollment will be limited to four to six students each year.

Interdisciplinary Curriculum

Effective legal work on international development problems requires substantive knowledge of both the transnational and international law of development and related areas of international environmental law, as well as a background in relevant economic, political, environmental, and administrative disciplines. This University of Washington LL.M. program allows students to obtain in-depth, interdisciplinary training, taking advantage of the University's unusually rich course offerings in areas of the student's interest including: economics, political science, international studies, sociology, public health, and environmental studies.

Career Opportunities

The central role of legal skills in dealing with this host of issues affecting sustainable international development gives rise to a concomitant need for systematic training of both U.S. and foreign lawyers. There is growing need for persons with these skills in foreign-government ministries, in agencies such as the Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and the United Nations, on legislative staffs, and in nongovernmental organizations (both those oriented to policy and those implementing projects in the field) and elsewhere in the private sector.

Professor Roy Prosterman

The Sustainable International Development LLM Program and Rural Development Institute are both synonymous with Director Professor Roy Prosterman. Thirty-five years ago, Professor Prosterman left a rising career with one of the nation’s top law firms, Sullivan & Cromwell, for a teaching post at the University of Washington School of Law. Fueled by an interest in doing something about the poverty and under-development he witnessed first-hand while practicing law in Liberia and Puerto Rico, he sought to apply the law to building a better world.

In 1967, troubled by poverty and violent conflicts, Prosterman – then a young professor of property law – began to use the law to help reshape the world. In an article titled “How to Have a Revolution Without a Revolution,” he proposed a program of democratic land reform to satisfy the grievances of the rural landless poor in developing countries.

His idea caught the attention of U.S. policy makers, who at that time were seeking a political settlement to the conflict in Vietnam. Soon he found himself in the middle of the Vietnam War, drafting legislation for a “land-to-the-tiller” program – carried out between 1970 and 1973 – that provided land ownership to one million tenant farmer families. Although too late to halt the conflict, the program cut Viet Cong recruitment by 80 percent and boosted agricultural productivity by 30 percent.

Since then, Professor Prosterman and his associates have gone on to apply and develop variants of this peaceful approach to land reform in 35 developing countries around the globe. For such accomplishments, he has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
 

Rural Development Institute

In 1981, Professor Prosterman and his associates founded the Rural Development Institute (RDI), an independent, non-profit organization, as a means to carry their work forward. RDI’s general focus is in alleviating world poverty and promoting global stability through democratic land reform and rural development measures that confirm human potential and individual freedoms in less developed and transitional economies. Many of RDI’s projects have focused on the creation and implementation of land reform laws that create market-oriented land systems and enhance economic opportunities for all who work the land.

RDI engages in legal and in-country field research, project design, implementation, and evaluation. The programs relate directly to reform measures that advance the privatization of land, develop market-oriented land systems, and enhance economic opportunities for all who till the soil. Along the way, RDI has helped bring land ownership or owner-like rights to millions of the world’s rural poor. For further information about the Rural Development Institute, please refer to the website at: http://www.rdiland.org