By Ann W. Parks

Gardner with Professor Tomer Broude

Stephen D. Gardner (LL.M. ’97), chief counsel of the Commercial Law Development Program in the U.S. Department of Commerce, talks commercial law with students on February 11.

For a few years in the 1970s, the per capita income of Liberia rivaled that of Japan, according to Stephen D. Gardner (LL.M. ’97), chief counsel of the Commercial Law Development Program in the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Now, after several years of civil war that left the country in ruins, Liberia is ranked by the World Bank as among the poorest countries in the world.

“This is why commerce isn’t working in Monrovia,” Gardner told a group of students gathered in McDonough 492 at Georgetown Law, as he displayed an astounding photo of a destroyed cargo ship that foundered in a Liberian port — and was left there, because of lack of funds to move it. “It really is smack in the middle of everything.”

Gardner appeared on campus February 11 at the request of Visiting Professor Tomer Broude (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) to discuss the need for commercial law systems in poorer countries like Liberia. Although he was admittedly “preaching to the choir” — because most of the audience consisted of students in Broude’s seminar on Developing Countries in the International Economic System — Gardner noted that commercial law is not always the first thing that those in poorer countries think of, when essentials like food and water are scarce.

“The bottom line is, you can’t leave commercial law out,” he said. “[You have to] put together a sustainable development plan to support business.”

Established in 1992, the Commercial Law Development Program provides commercial law assistance to governments and private sectors of developing and transitional countries to help support their economic development goals. Among other things, it has put “benchbooks,” or judicial reference manuals, in the hands of judges deciding commercial law issues in Qatar; it has also helped judges in Algeria set up specialized courts to address intellectual property violations. This course of action arose after Procter & Gamble, the U.S.-based manufacturer of consumer goods, sought to cut back investment in that country because it could not effectively seek redress for the counterfeiting of its products there. Another ongoing project seeks to develop intellectual property protection legislation in Nigeria.

“A number of legislators are very interested in this, but it hasn’t resulted in a signed dotted line,” Gardner noted, adding that many in the business community in Nigeria would like to see the legislation pass — as would those at CLDP. “I’d love to add that as a success story,” he said.

American laws?

A number of students, many of them foreign LL.M. students, questioned whether the work merely helped to create laws in favor of American companies — and whether Algeria, for example, was upset about Americans coming into the country to support P&G.

“The government of Algeria was upset about potentially losing a big, international company,” Gardner replied, adding that both the country and the company had been frustrated in this case, and that law reform helped pave the way to greater cooperation. “It’s all about what the country wants to do. We provide suggestions for improvements and technical assistance, and then each country takes it from there.”

Professor Broude says that development policy, and its legal implementation, is all about dilemmas like these. “In the classroom, we work on analyzing the complexity of historical, economic, social and legal factors that are involved in the problem of global poverty,” he explained. “This was a great opportunity to introduce the students to a development practitioner who actually has to provide solutions.”