upfront about the theory of law that underpins their views and expectations. 183
Unpacking the commonly used measures of RL should make us think critically
about the construct of RL on which they are based. Rather than measuring RL,
these instruments often serve to measure the level of democratic values in a
society or the extent to which it has implemented Western democratic
traditions and thought. Often, indices of RL capture both a classical view of
the law as being derived from nature or written by God and the influence of the
legal process school, which envisions RL as a system of processes based on
neutral principles. These two theories of law often do not and cannot fit into
the same construct of RL. Indeed, any instrument that measures RL will
require analysts to make trade-offs between, say, democracy, legal formalism,
and the legal process view.