In Emerging Nations, a California Firm Takes Up Task of Ensuring Rule of Law

When the Bush administration conceded last week that the transition to a free political system in Iraq is likely to prove, er, “untidy,” one of the least surprised people, outside of the Iraqis themselves, was Bill Davis.

“You can’t just spring up overnight and create institutions and say, ‘You have a new system,’ ” he observed this week in his downtown San Francisco office. “You have to create processes to build some social capital, so there’s some level of trust between people. It doesn’t lend itself to swiftness.”

Davis hasn’t visited Iraq, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t speaking from experience. As co-founder of DPK Consulting, his business is helping to establish, restore or improve judicial systems in emerging countries around the globe. When I met with him, he had just returned from a trip to Macedonia; his partner, Bob Page, was in a neighboring office, unpacking from his own visit to Bulgaria.

“We do hard,” Davis says wryly, ticking off the countries or areas in which DPK and its roughly 100 employees are fulfilling contracts from development agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank: Serbia’s Kosovo province, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank among them.

The particular issues in each case, naturally, vary widely. In the Palestinian territories, for example, the challenge is to cobble a distinctly Palestinian judicial system out of the diverse cultural and political models that have shaped the community’s experience, ranging from the Ottoman Empire to Egypt and Jordan and even the Israeli military.

“Attempting to create a single body of law and a frame of reference is no small feat,” Davis says. “I’m not a seer, so I’m not sure how it’s all going to work out.”

In the circumstances, that’s an admirable expression of humility. Davis’ devotion to his work despite its complexity comes from his conviction that the rule of law is part of the social fabric that allows all other freedoms -- including economic freedom -- to bloom.

The international donor agencies that provide the bulk of DPK’s $8.5 million in current contracts “believe that promoting the rule of law has got to be an integral part of the development agenda,” he says. While they’re “pouring money into places to build institutions and create processes, they’re finding that human rights are still being violated and property is still being confiscated.”

Although much of that concern reflects the fears of donors and foreign investors about the security of their own money, Davis argues that creating effective judicial structures in emerging nations allows them to see globalization as something other than a tool of economic imperialism.

“I feel like these places need to have the ability to defend themselves and not just be overwhelmed by large corporations,” Davis says. “The stronger their justice system, the more they are likely to withstand international influence.”

Davis, 60, came to his international calling from a career in judicial administration in the United States. A University of Kentucky law graduate -- a soft Midwestern drawl is still audible in his speech -- he oversaw a huge reorganization of that state’s court system in the 1970s. The goal was to eradicate the sources of judicial delay by, among other things, eliminating court stenographers in favor of audio and video recordings.

By 1987, he was undertaking the same role in the administrative office of the courts in California. The state’s judicial system was then laboring under an epic procedural backlog that resulted in civil cases in Los Angeles taking as long as five years to come to trial.

The solution, he found, depended on encouraging judges to play a more active role in case management.

“Every time a court asks the parties to do something, that increases the likelihood of a settlement,” he told me. “The more passive the judges are, the longer things take.”

Davis brought that lesson with him as he began to work on problems of judicial administration in Latin America and South Asia, initially at the invitation of the State Department and, after 1993, as partner in the firm he and Page founded in 1993.

Judges had to be taught that they had the authority to take command of their own court dockets, and then taught the techniques to do so. (The passivity of judges in some parts of Asia has produced delays in civil litigation of as long as a Dickensian 20 years.) Davis found that equipping judges with a judicial mind-set was an important step in giving them the independence needed to stand up to the local bar, politicians and economic powers.

“I gave a talk to judges in Macedonia the other day to the effect that ‘you are in a position of the highest trust a society can give. Society only gives judges the right to imprison people, to break up families and to allocate goods between parties. There’s no greater expression of trust for any public official.’ This was something no one had ever said, because they had been taught that their role is as a functionary. My sense of what we do has not just a technical but a philosophical dimension -- to encourage members of a judicial branch to have a more lofty vision of their purpose.”

He also knows full well that such a process can take years, especially when the trust placed in government institutions has been eroded by corruption or despotism; even in the U.S., nearly 15 years passed between the ratification of the Constitution, which created a system of checks and balances, and John Marshall’s seminal Supreme Court ruling in Marbury vs. Madison, which cemented the judiciary’s claim to be a branch of government coequal to the legislative and executive.

Creating that balance in a place such as Iraq, where judges lacking the stain of affiliation with the deposed Baath Party will have to be identified, trained and invested with the public’s trust, could take much longer. Whether it can happen under American supervision is a further question.

Davis’ firm, in fact, chose not to take up an invitation to participate in a governance contract for postwar Iraq that was issued before the war started, which marks DPK as the unusual company that hasn’t seen the invasion of Iraq as an opportunity for the main chance.

“We had misgivings about how this was being done,” Davis says, choosing his words carefully. “If you’ve believed most of your life in the promotion of the rule of law and the notion that we’re building a fabric that ensures people everywhere that their rights will be protected, and that there’s a community of nations whose interests should be taken into consideration before one nation decides to intervene in another, we had trouble with that. So we didn’t participate.”

He also seems to wonder whether the American government understands that a new generation of Iraqi institutions will have to grow organically out of the country’s own cultural soil -- that creating a bureaucratic structure, even a body of statutes, is a tenuous first step.

“The credibility of the institutions is built by the actions of the people who make it up,” he says. “There’s no quick fix there.”

On the other hand, USAID is said to be working on a project to set up dispute-resolution forums in Iraq that might be the precursor to a new legal system -- “more of what we do,” Davis says. And if an opportunity in Iraq doesn’t pan out, demand for the creation of strong and viable systems to allow people to settle disputes, large and trivial, is rising around the world.

Davis produces a list of contracts on which his firm is considering making bids in the next few months. There’s Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Peru. “We’re a small firm, but we might be getting a lot bigger,” he says.

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Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. Michael Hiltzik can be reached at golden.state@latimes.com.