In an age fueled by globalization and focused on the struggling citizens of the urban metropolis, it might come as a surprise to learn that most of the worldโs 1.4 billion poorest people are still rural. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these populations lack ownership ofโand rights toโthe land that forms their principal source of livelihood. Although land reform and related legal work have transformed the lives of millions of families by providing secure land rights, not all such efforts have succeeded. That mix of success and failure has been a big part of the reason that, in recent years, the conventional wisdom concerning law and land tenure reformโwhat is needed, what is possible, and how such reform contributes to pro-poor developmentโhas changed, sometimes in striking ways. In this timely and important volume, lawyers from the Rural Development Institute and the University of Washingtonโs School of Law in Seattle use four decades worth of research on the results of land tenure reform efforts around the world in order to address how we might better meet the struggles to understand and change the plight of the rural poor.