November 1995 Three things are essential to implement decentralized legal frameworks in any setting: reasonable laws, adequate institutions, and market-oriented incentives. The problem in transition economies is that all three must to a large extent be built from scratch. The question to ask at any point in time is not whether there is rule of law, but whether the country is moving in the right direction along all three dimensions. Implementing decentralized legal frameworks requires reasonable laws, adequate institutions, and market-oriented incentives. All three must exist together. Laws or institutions without each other or without a supportive framework of incentives are likely to lie dormant, while incentives by themselves will be frustrated without a reasonable legal framework and institutions to support and enforce them. Developing any of these elements is a major challenge, and progress along all three takes time. In transition economies, not only must new laws be drafted (a daunting task yet perhaps the easiest of the three) but they must be accompanied by the growth of supportive institutions (including formal judicial institutions and the watchdog institutions that we almost take for granted in advanced market economies). And they must be accompanied by economic reforms -- whether privatization (particularly with outside owners) or banking reforms -- that separate actors from the state and reinforce market-based incentives. Gray and Hendley use two case studies -- Hungarian bankruptcy law and Russian company law -- to illustrate the interaction of these three elements in practice. These cases illustrate their general view that Central Europe is somewhat further along on all three dimensions than Russia. Russia is not advanced in the development of either laws or institutions, among other reasons because it lacks Hungary's pre-war legacy of a legal tradition (Russia having never been a society or an economy ruled fundamentally by law) and because it launched economic reform much later. As for incentives, in both countries relevant actors exert weaker demand for proper implementation of the laws on the books -- weaker demand that there be stable rules of the game -- than one would expect in more mature market economies. The cases belie any simplistic notion that the rule of law can be mechanically dictated from above. Top-down reform of bankruptcy law in Hungary appears to have been at least marginally successful in changing expectations and behavior, partly because it stimulated the growth of new supporting institutions. It might have been more successful if other areas of government policy had created more complementary incentives, particularly in banks. Top-down reform of company law in Russia has had little impact to date on either institutional development or firm behavior. This paper -- a product of the Transition Economics Division, Policy Research Department -- was prepared for the John M. Olin Lecture Series at Harvard University.