ITHACA, N.Y. -- Are there lessons to be learned when exported U.S.-style democracy fails to take root in the world's less-developed regions?

The organizers of a conference at Cornell University on law and development think so. The conference, which takes place on Cornell's campus Sunday through Tuesday, April 18-20, will examine such rocky terrain as U.S. nation-building efforts in Iraq and elsewhere and will seek to learn from past failures and successes.

"The Practice of Law and Development: Socio-legal Approaches," will bring together international scholars and practitioners from the fields of law, economics, anthropology, history and science studies to define a new set of questions for the broad field of law and development. All talks and panels are free and open to the public. Sponsors are the Cornell Poverty, Inequality and Development Initiative, the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture, and the Cornell Seminar on the Social Sciences.

"This conference is an attempt to formulate a response to current American nation-building projects in the Middle East and elsewhere," said Annelise Riles, professor of law and of anthropology at Cornell and director of the Law School's Clarke Program. "One important aspect of many current U.S. initiatives is the exportation of U.S. law -- from new election laws to banking laws to training for judges and lawyers. Often law is described as the means of bringing U.S. democratic values, such as transparency, accountability or religious pluralism to other places," Riles noted. "But there is an emerging sense in the legal community that in the current rush to export U.S. legal institutions, it is worthwhile to take a moment to reflect critically on the lessons of past U.S. 'law and development' projects, from Japan in the 1940s to Latin America in the 1960s to Eastern Europe in the 1990s,"she said. The conference also will look at how U.S. nation-building efforts in Iraq today differ from past efforts in the Middle East and elsewhere, for example, "how the fact of occupation or the changed sensibility of Americans after 9/11 might alter the picture, and, in particular, to include the perspectives of lawyers from other parts of the world who find themselves on the receiving end of American legal exports," said Riles.

Finally, because "legal rules alone are never enough," Riles said, "we thought it would be useful to provide a forum to begin a broad interdisciplinary conversation about current American efforts to export the rule of law and the lawyers who manage nation-building projects." The conference unites veterans of American law and development projects from the 1950s to the present, European, African and Asian lawyers and scholars from across the social sciences and humanities.

Welcoming remarks by Cornell Law School Dean Stewart Schwab and Roberto Unger, a Harvard Law School professor, are Sunday starting at 4 p.m. in Myron Taylor Hall's Weiss faculty lounge. Monday's events are at the Statler Hotel's Yale-Princeton Room; Tuesday's events are at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art's sixth-floor conference room. For the full schedule, see this Web site: http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/international/Asianlaw/LADconference.asp . For information, and to be included in any conference-related meals, contact Donna Hastings at dkh25@cornell.edu .