In the last ten years, the promotion of the rule of law has become one of the essential components of the politics of international developmental assistance. Paradoxically, the rather substantial investments that have taken place both financially and professionally, according to most commentators, have not had results proportional to the amounts invested. Recurring scholarly criticisms emphasize that the enduring forces of culture and legal tradition have led to the repeated failure of efforts to transplant features of one system to another.

The close relationship of the legal field to the institutions of the nationstate contrasts with the internationalization of the field of economics, where pretentions of a universal global science coexist with different national practices (Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb 2002; Fourcade-Gourinchas 2006). The spread, content and modes of international transfer of these two types of governing expertise depend on logics tied to the specific history of these professional fields. This history determines how each field constructed its national autonomy, and more particularly, how it supports its claim to universalism played out through active transnational networks structured around the major institutions for the production and diffusion of expertise. The role and authority of degrees and expertise gained abroad contributes to a hierarchical division of labor that in turn leads to the reproduction both of the transnational expertise and of the national elites that promote it.

It is necessary, therefore, to work through national histories in order to understand the market for the import and export of state expertise.