Law Versus Development
Chinese businesses are pouring into Ethiopia. When someone gets hurt, what happens?
Reviewing Immunity on Trial, by Miriam Driessen (University of California Press, 2026).
A few months into their first semester, students in U.S. law schools will often notice the following: not too long ago, a disturbingly large number of Americans were injured, maimed, or killed in incidents involving trains. In Erie Railroad Company v. Tompkins (1938), a landmark case in civil procedure, a man walking near a rail line is struck by an open door of a passing train. He falls beneath the tracks, and ends up losing an arm. In Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Company (1928), a favorite case among torts professors, a woman on a station platform suffers from an extraordinarily unlucky series of events. A man running to catch a train carries a box, which he drops; the box contains fireworks, one of which explodes; the explosion causes a scale to topple over, which falls onto the woman’s head; several days later, shaken from the events, she develops a stammer.
These train injuries formed one small part of a much larger pattern. Across the late 1800s and early 1900s, Americans witnessed profound changes in how the U.S. economy worked. Some changes arose from new technology, such as trains. Others arose from new business techniques, such as the formation of massive monopolies. During this period, a major question for lawyers, judges, and legislators was how to build a legal system that could encourage industrialization without causing too much social disruption. The legal regime we in the United States have inherited from that era is the result of decades of debate over the following questions: How much pain should be tolerated in the name of economic growth? And who should bear it?
In the United States, those questions have receded from public debate. By the end of World War II, the United States had established itself beyond question as one of the world’s most “developed” countries. That status became only more deeply entrenched in the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War. Questions about development have of course continued to percolate among some corners of the legal profession, and critics have persistently raised concerns that the U.S. legal system frustrates economic advances. (This was the basic point of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance; twenty years earlier, prominent legal scholar Robert Kagan made a similar observation, when he pointed out that American public works often get weighted down in endless legal proceedings.) But for several decades, the most high-profile legal debates in the United States have revolved not around economic growth, but around racial justice and individual rights.
In much of the world, the situation is different. Questions about law and development continue to capture a great deal of attention, especially in the Global South, both among specialists and in the public sphere. In many locations, those questions now carry a geopolitical gloss. Lawyers and legislators no longer need to deal only with new technologies and business practices. They also must work with foreign economic partners, many of whom bring their own ideas about how an economy “should” work, and about the laws that should govern economic exchanges.
Since roughly the year 2000, a particular challenge has been posed by the rise China. For many countries across Africa, Latin America, and Central and Southeast Asia, resources from China have grown dramatically, in the form of loans, investments, and traded goods. At the same time, Chinese partners—ranging from public officials in Chinese embassies to business leaders of Chinese enterprises—have brought their own, particular ideas about law and development. These ideas are often grounded in China’s own domestic experience. By the standards of “Western” development theory, they are also highly heterodox.
How should people in the Global South design a legal system that best makes use of Chinese capital? In her excellent new book Immunity on Trial, Oxford anthropologist Miriam Driessen follows a range of judges, lawyers, and litigants in Ethiopia as they grapple with this question. She reveals—unsurprisingly, and discomfortingly—that conflicts run deep, and are unlikely to lend themselves to happy compromises. Frequently, both sides disagree even on the basic nature of their relationship. “Once you have completed your job, you are nothing for them,” says one Ethiopian employee of a Chinese firm. “They use you and throw you away, just like socks” (46). A Chinese construction worker sees things differently. “These black people,” he insists, “don’t realize we are here to help them” (65).
Many of China’s ventures into Ethiopia are infrastructure projects. These involve the employment of a large number of people under relatively dangerous conditions. As a result, they sometimes give rise to employment disputes, and less frequently, but more seriously, they also result in serious injuries, or death. Driessen describes one notorious episode in which an Ethiopian mechanic on a tunnel-building project was standing on a moveable platform. A Chinese foreman pressed a button that raised the platform, and the Ethiopian mechanic, unable to move in time, was fatally crushed against the tunnel roof.
This is Driessen’s second book about Chinese enterprises in Ethiopia. As with her first, she draws on an exceptionally rich collection of materials. These include in-depth interviews with Ethiopian litigants, judges, and lawyers, as well as observations of courtroom proceedings. She also, somehow, manages to conduct interviews with Chinese workers and managers. This is an impressive achievement; Chinese enterprises often resist scrutiny from researchers, and it would have been valuable to learn more about how Driessen gained access. Driessen gathered most of her materials during an eleven-month stay in Ethiopia during 2020. As she notes, this was a turbulent time for her research subjects. In January, COVID-19 started to spread across China; in March, the first reported case appeared in Ethiopia; in November, a civil war broke out in Ethiopia, in the northern region of Tigray.
Driessen centers the book on the concept of legal “immunity.” As she frames it, this is the power of Chinese actors (individuals and enterprises) to withdraw legal claims from the Ethiopian legal system and to resolve them in other fora, such as private mediation or international arbitration. In the case of the Chinese foreman and the Ethiopian mechanic, for example, the Chinese defendant successfully, and opaquely, removed the case from the Ethiopian court system. (Years later, opposition politicians pointed to this event as one example of the government’s pattern of caving to Chinese capital.) As Driessen points out, there is nothing inherently unusual or suspect about legal immunity. Many legal systems grant it to at least some entities, such as government officials. The difficult question posed by the influx of Chinese enterprises into Ethiopia is whether those enterprises and their employees should receive immunity, and if so, why.
As Driessen reveals, Chinese businesses (and their lawyers) put forward two reasons that they deserve immunity. The first is that Chinese investment in Ethiopia forms a type of gift, and that litigation against Chinese entities is an expression of ingratitude. This argument seems unlikely to get much traction outside of China; Driessen finds little evidence of uptake among Ethiopians. The second, and more substantial, argument is that litigation against Chinese enterprises—and, more generally, the existence of a strong legal system, which is independent from other branches of government, and which vigorously protects rights guaranteed by law—is counterproductive to Ethiopia’s economic prospects. Driessen recounts one painful episode in which an employee of a Chinese company strikes and kills a young Ethiopian girl with his car. The manager of the Chinese company later urges the girl’s family to accept a settlement and drop any future court case. “We came here to work,” the manager informed the family. “Our work must not be interrupted” (35).
Across various interviews, Driessen reports, Chinese respondents described Ethiopia’s legal system as too “rigid,” “protective,” or “complete” for its level of wealth (59). This is not a frivolous argument. China achieved rapid, sustained economic growth without a legal system that strongly protected worker rights. More generally, China’s domestic experience suggests that robust, Western-style institutions (such as a legal system that resembles what currently exists in the United States) may not be conducive to short-term economic growth, and may, in fact, stifle it. A growing number of scholars, with Johns Hopkins political economist Yuen Yuen Ang foremost among them, insist that the task facing political leaders in the Global South is not to construct institutions that conform to Western-influenced ideals. Rather, it is to support economic activity using the institutions that are available and workable in their current environment.
Many Ethiopians reject both of these arguments. To them, in deciding whether Chinese enterprises should be immune from lawsuits, the most important consideration is not Ethiopia’s growth prospects; it is Ethiopia’s status as a sovereign, independent state. Summarizing the views of one Ethiopian judge, Driessen writes that “[i]mmunity, in [his] eyes, was non-transactional,” and “cannot be acquired or given away in return for economic development.” Many Ethiopians were preoccupied with “dignity.” This meant the dignity of individuals, but also to the dignity of the Ethiopian state, which, as a source of pride that is constantly referred to by its leaders, was never colonized.
One Ethiopian who spent more than ten years working for Chinese managers summarized his experiences this way: “They don’t listen to us. They don’t respect us. They don’t really listen to what you say.” For many in Ethiopia, this is not the type of behavior that they want to reward with legal immunity.
Driessen sometimes frames her book as a contest between two groups: Chinese litigants trying to pull their cases out of Ethiopian courts, and Ethiopian litigants trying to yank them back in. It is surprising, therefore, to find many people in its pages who fit into neither group.
Some Chinese enterprises and managers have no problem litigating in Ethiopia. In run-of-the-mill employment disputes—where nobody died, and nobody is going to jail—Chinese parties are frequently willing to participate in Ethiopian legal proceedings. Some have even become savvy users of that system. Driessen describes one enterprise that, after a loss in court, learned that it needed to provide proof that terminated workers had been performing poorly. It then set itself to stockpiling that evidence, and later, in a suit for wrongful termination, it provided the court with a video of a fired worker sitting in the shade. It also submitted a photograph of him on the construction site, napping.
Even more interesting, Driessen identifies stark differences in opinion between people in Ethiopia. Recall the case of the Ethiopian worker crushed against the roof of a tunnel. That case ended when the responsible prosecutor’s office sent a letter to the local police, informing them that the charges were being dismissed “for the benefit of maintaining good relations between the two countries” (21). This pattern repeats across many cases that Driessen recounts, and aligns with my own findings about litigation related to Chinese projects in Kenya. The upshot is significant. The contest over immunity is not only between Ethiopia and China. It is also between different representatives of the Ethiopian state, and what is at stake is not only the power of Chinese enterprises and their employees, but also the distribution of power between different arms of the Ethiopian government.
Why do any Ethiopian leaders want to grant immunity to Chinese enterprises? Driessen describes an interview with one judge whose opinions followed the lines put forward by Chinese officials and business leaders. To this judge, the worker-protective slant of Ethiopian labor law presented an obstacle to Ethiopia’s immediate economic development. The judge thought it might be worthwhile for Ethiopia to devise a formal, separate set of rules for employees of foreign businesses, which would encourage foreign investment. “One of the grounds of attracting foreign direct investment is how a country’s law protects the investor’s rights,” he tells Driessen. “[T]hey should not have to spend all of their time in court” (131).
On an online discussion board, Driessen finds a post written by an author who claims to be a Chinese worker who has spent many years in Africa:
“[I]n fact many other African countries . . . give you a feeling of a small horse pulling a big carriage. The big carriage stands for a perfect administration and a legal system left by the Western colonialists. The small horse stands for the country’s backward economic condition, the quality of the masses, the level of education, and so forth. The small horse cannot pull this whole superstructure.”
This image of a horse pulling an overly large carriage reflects one view of the relationship between law and development: that overly strong legal institutions operate as an impediment to economic growth. It is a powerful metaphor, and it stands for a viewpoint that is gaining traction across the world.
But it is also a flawed one. It assumes that the only objective is growth, and that the main consideration is speed. Neither assumption is necessarily true. Certain features of a legal system—such as strong worker protections, regardless of employer—may appeal to many Ethiopians, even if those features potentially reduce the rate of economic growth. Many people might not mind a slightly longer, slightly slower trip to “development,” if they can spend it in a nicer carriage.
Kevin Keller is an Associate Professor at the University of Missouri - Kansas City School of Law. Follow him on X here, or on Bluesky here.
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