Ask an Expert
World Justice Project’s Elizabeth Andersen: Bars Have Critical Role to Play in Advancing Rule of Law
May 01, 2023
Every year since 2008, the World Justice Project has been tracking and measuring how well countries around
the world adhere to the universal principles of the rule of law, drawing upon the experiences and perception of more than 154,000 people and experts in 140 countries. Its 2022 WJP Rule of Law Index, released in October, shows a continuing decline of the rule of law globally due to rising acts of violence, corruption, and impunity as well as a growing number of governments embracing authoritarianism.
The World Justice Project measures rule of law using eight factors: constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice, and criminal justice.
“Based on surveys that we conduct in every country, we develop scores and rankings for countries on each of these factors, as well as some more detailed factors within each of them. It enables one to have a pretty fine-grained assessment of the rule of law in each country, as well as the global picture,” says Elizabeth “Betsy” Andersen, executive director of the World Justice Project.
Andersen has more than 20 years of experience in the area of international law and legal development, having formerly served as director of the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI) and its Europe and Eurasia Division, as executive director of the American Society of International Law, and as executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia Division. Andersen is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Law Institute.
At the World Justice Project, Andersen leads the organization’s global efforts to advance the rule of law through research, strategic convenings, and support for innovative programs. The D.C. Bar recently spoke with Andersen to discuss the World Justice Project’s work relating to rule of law at home and abroad.
What does the 2022 Index tell us about the state of the rule of law in the world today?
Unfortunately, what we see globally is a pretty persistent negative trend in the rule of law. This last year, 2022, was the fifth year in a row in which a majority of countries declined in the rule of law. That was quite worrying and disappointing.
We had seen a particularly sharp downturn in the pandemic era, and to some extent this was understandable or expected because courts were closed [and] delays in justice resulted. And we were forbidden from assembling in large groups, so our scores on freedom of assembly or freedom of association declined during the pandemic. There were a lot of emergency orders that curtailed freedom during that period.
So, the resulting declines in the rule of law may have been expected during a pandemic year, but it was thought that, coming out of the pandemic, we would see a rebound. Unfortunately, we did not. The number of countries that had declining rule of law was smaller than it was in the pandemic year, but it was still a majority of countries that were declining between the pandemic year and this year.
Moreover, two-thirds of the countries that declined during the pandemic year declined further in 2022, so we almost see a snowball effect. Some of the declines were steepest in countries that already had the weakest rule of law. Those are very worrying global trends that we see. We are in the field now gathering data for our 2023 Index, and we’re hopeful that we’ll see some improvement, but it’s a generally worrying trend.
I should say that the sharpest declines over the past several years have been in constraints on government powers, which are limits put on the executive by the legislature, the judiciary, by audit agencies or inspectors general, by civil society, and elections. We’ve seen pretty significant declines in recent years across the world in that area. The other area where we’ve seen the sharpest declines are fundamental rights. That is freedom of association, freedom of assembly, and so on. Those are areas that require particular attention.
Lest we be too depressed by this data, there are some bright spots .… One of the things that jumped out at us when we created a heatmap of improvements in the rule of law was a trend around Russia. We looked at the top 10 improvers globally over the past seven years, [and] five of them are former Soviet states, five neighbors of Russia, including Ukraine.
That’s kind of interesting and it signals, to me, some really stark choices that societies are making about whether they’re going to embrace rule of law, as in the case of these five improvers, versus those who are turning away from [it]. Russia was one of the decliners during that period. We’re rooting for the improvers and looking for ways to support that progress.
What is the state of rule of law domestically?
The U.S. has largely followed this global trend, unfortunately. Rule of law improved between 2015 and 2016, but then declined every year between 2016 and 2021. From 2021 to 2022, it ticked up again; in fact, the U.S. was one of the top five improvers in that year. So, that’s progress, but it’s important to note that we are still below where we were in 2016.
Decline in the U.S. has taken place in the same areas as in other parts of the world, especially in constraints on government powers and fundamental rights. For example, the U.S. has declined in constraints on government powers in the period between 2016 and 2022 by 15 percent. We’ve seen similar declines in fundamental rights in the United States.
These areas of deterioration are compounding other areas where the U.S. has been historically relatively weak in the rule of law. These are areas around discrimination and access to justice, where the U.S. ranks quite low in our global Index. Overall, the U.S. is 26th out of 140 countries in 2022, but, for example, in accessibility and affordability of the civil justice system, the U.S. ranks 115th. On discrimination, the U.S. ranks 103rd out of 140 countries. On discrimination in the civil justice system, the U.S. is 121st, so that’s pretty stark data that, I think, demands attention from lawyers and anyone who cares about the rule of law in the United States.
What threats or obstacles are preventing the advancement of rule of law today?
It’s a pretty complicated picture and very particularized by country. I would encourage people to really dig into the data available on the World Justice Project’s website. There is information on individual countries, and looking at how ratings for specific factors have changed over time can help understand those specific contexts. But painting with a broad stroke, there are several trends that we see.
One, as I mentioned, is this decline in constraints on government powers and in fundamental rights. This is associated with what we see, globally, as a rise in authoritarianism, an erosion of democratic freedoms, and a shrinking space for civil society. That’s been a persistent multiyear trend that we’ve seen. It was really compounded by the pandemic, and we haven’t seen a rebound post-pandemic. So, there’s work to be done there to roll back emergency measures, to address issues of delays in judicial proceedings, to protect fundamental rights such as media freedoms, and to grapple with issues around discrimination that emerged in the context of the pandemic and continue to plague many societies. I would say that those are the biggest hurdles we see in our index data.
Backing up a little bit from what we see in the data, I think it’s fair to say that there are societal challenges that we face relating to disinformation. That has compounded a lack of trust in institutions that really is fundamental to the rule of law. Much of the rule of law comes about by voluntary compliance of people with laws and institutions that they trust, that they consider fair. As that erodes — and I think disinformation, unfortunately, contributes to this — then the rule of law also suffers.
Is the World Justice Project undertaking new efforts to support rule of law?
We collect data and use the data to raise awareness about the issues here in the United States and around the world. It’s quite eye-opening to probe this data. We are hoping to deepen our study of the rule of law here in the United States by conducting a state-by-state measurement, which we’ve done in some other countries. We’ve done this state-by-state analysis in Mexico; we’re doing a sub-national study in the European Union currently, and it’s quite revealing.
Many aspects of the rule of law play out at the local level as a function of actions taken by local authorities, the local police, for example. And so, there can be a lot of variance across jurisdictions, particularly in a federal system like the one we have. It will be interesting to look at that variance and tease out what works and what doesn’t in different jurisdictions and to foster the learning across jurisdictions from that kind of study. That’s one aspect of the work we are doing — to raise awareness of this data, to do more data collection and analysis, and to put it in the hands of people who can act on it.
We’re also quite focused on addressing issues around lack of understanding and trust in our institutions, and we see a critical role for lawyers and bar associations to play in this work. So, we are working with a number of organizations to raise awareness of effective civics education programming, to contribute some of our resources around the index to those efforts, to help people who want to teach the Index to do so, and to foster constructive conversations about the rule of law in schools and more broadly in communities.
We see the role of bar associations as critically important, and the role of bar leaders, in particular, as essential to helping communities sort rule of law fact from fiction. The bar, and bar leaders, can be effective advocates for the rule of law and explainers of the institutions and processes, which are often difficult to understand.
So, we are partnering with the National Conference of Bar Presidents to develop programming for their upcoming annual meeting in Denver, in August. We aim to support bar leaders in becoming effective communicators about the rule of law and effective champions of the rule of law, and to support bars in developing programming to address some of the other issues that I’ve mentioned. Mostly, it’s about supporting local leaders who, I think, in the final analysis, need to roll up their sleeves and play an important role in combatting these negative trends and building trust in our institutions.
The World Justice Project’s annual Rule of Law Index and additional information about the organization and its work can be found at worldjusticeproject.org.
