Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar's Courts Make Law and Order.

• Author: Crouch, Melissa
• Position: Book review

Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar's Courts Make Law and Order. By Nick Cheesman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Hardback: 317pp.

Every now and then, a book comes along that offers a fresh take on a topic that has become commonplace. The rule of law is a ubiquitous theme running through the law and development landscape and the way we think about law reform in this era. The empire that has become the rule of law has few limits, and is bolstered by endless programmes, videos, fact sheets, checklists, reports, measures and metrics. Yet a new book by Nick Cheesman, Opposing the Rule of Law, challenges current conceptions of the political and legal ideal of the rule of law, and takes the conversation in an entirely new direction. This is a book of "firsts" in many respects, not least because it is the first major study of courts in Myanmar and the first to do so drawing primarily on Burmese language documentation. Given the centrality of Myanmar to the current global rule of law project, the contribution and timing of Cheesman's study on the rule of law in Myanmar is fitting.

The rule of law literature is daunting both due to its sheer size and the complexity of the debates, which range from the theoretical to the practical. Tackling this literature by going beyond the tired conceptions of the rule of law, Cheesman instead chooses to approach the rule of law through the notion of opposing ideas as a way of illuminating the elements of a concept (pp. 7-8). This theoretical orientation is then supported and reinforced with a methodology that is impressive in its empirical breadth and depth, encompassing a wide range of primary and secondary legal materials from the colonial period to the present. The appendix provides an exemplary model of a rigorous, socio-legal approach, fitting for this Cambridge Studies in Law and Society series.

Throughout, Cheesman's primary argument is that "law and order" as a concept is opposed to the rule of law, and yet these two ideas have become conflated. He associates the rule of law with the central role of the judiciary, and the transparency and predictability of law. On the other hand, the notion of "law and order" is associated with arbitrary executive action, and therefore stands in contrast to the ideal of the rule of law. His argument is that not only have global ideas of the rule of law become confused with the concept of law and order, but that in Myanmar the two terms are semantically...