Revista da EMERJ - V. 21 - N. 3 - Setembro/Dezembro - 2019 - Tomo 1

 R. EMERJ, Rio de Janeiro, v. 21, n. 3, t. 1, p. 72-86, set.-dez., 2019  84 TOMO 1 and access to justice was the device through which communities could provide law as a public good, after having provided shelter, healthcare and education to the needy. Beginning in the early eighties, the global ideological picture had changed. Neo-liberal policies, inaugurated by prime minister Thatcher in Great Britain, […] and imported on a much weaker institutional background in Reagan’s America, were based on the very basic assumption that the welfare state was simply too expensive. […] Public shelter, health, education and justice for the poor were the natural “victims” of such budget cuts. 39 In my view the turn to neo-liberal policies had an influence on the development of the use of indicators in the field of civil procedure, but deepening this aspect would require a separate inquiry. To conclude, indicators are tremendously successful in attracting the attention of policy makers and government officials, thus prompting considerable amounts of benchmarking, dialogue and reform 40 . Indicators can be beneficial to foster comparative knowledge of legal systems and promoting reforms. The information gathered through the creation and use of indicators needs however to be integrated and corrected, both on the descriptive and the prescriptive side, far more than it currently happens, by the “local knowledge” of lawyers and social scientists living and working in the targeted countries. This also reflects a certain methodological approach, which is best expressed by Clifford Geertz’ words: “Like sailing, gardening, politics and poetry, law and ethnography are crafts of place: they work by the light of local knowledge”. 41 However, one should not endorse the Doing Business reports without reservation because they are redefining civil procedure in light of a single end (transaction costs, neoliberal agenda), whereas civil procedure is about rights and other social interests not reducible to economic efficiency. I. Zusammenfassung: Quantitative Indikatoren für die Evaluation von Rechtssystemen zu verwenden, ist für einen Juristen ein riskantes 39 Mattei , Access to Justice. A Renewed Global Issue?, in: Boele-Woelki, S. van Erp (Hg.), General Reports of the XVIIth Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law, vol. 2, 2007, 383. 40 Davis/Kingsbury/Engle Merry , Indicators as a Technology of Global Governance, Law & Society Review, 46 (2012), 71, 92. 41 Geertz , Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, 1983, 167.