An innovative effort to import institutions of the rule of law into Honduras has run into an obstacle, and that obstacle, of all things, is the Honduran Supreme Court. A five-judge panel of the court ruled that the plan to create a charter city with its own government, laws, and police forces, amounts to transferring national territory, which is forbidden by the constitution. The case now goes to the full 15-member Supreme Court. [CBS News, October 4]

The idea of charter cities has been developed by economist Paul Romer as a way of getting around the endemic political corruption that deters investment and economic growth in many underdeveloped countries. Short version: Transplant Hong Kong’s success to poor countries.

In a related report, the New York Times identifies the difficulty here: “To set up a new city with clear new rules, you must first deal with governments that are trapped in the old ones.” [New York Times, September 30]

Sidebar: Every single article about this project that we’ve read from a mainstream news source uses the adjective “privately run” to describe these planned cities while also reporting that the cities would have their own system of government. That’s a contradiction in terms. A museum can be privately run; an ice-skating rink can be privately run; a trash-collection service can be privately run; but a jurisdiction that has a government is by definition not privately run. It’s as if the media can’t conceive of political authority and accountability existing outside of a centralized national government. Nah, they couldn’t think that, could they?