Speaker Series: Taisu Zhang

Taisu Zhang is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School and works on comparative legal and economic history, private law theory, and contemporary Chinese law and politics. He is the author of two books, The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press, 2017). These are the first two entries in a planned trilogy of books on the institutional and cultural origins of early modern economic divergence. He is currently writing two other books: the first, The Authoritarian Functions of Law (And Their Application to Contemporary China), is under contract with Harvard University Press and examines the political and socioeconomic logic of legalization in China. The second, tentatively titled The Cultural-Legal Origins of Economic Divergence, completes the trilogy mentioned above. Zhang’s academic articles and essays have recently appeared in journals such as the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Legal Analysis, the Yale Law Journal, and the Harvard Law Review. His work has won awards and prizes from a number of academic organizations.

Zhang is a Global Faculty member at Peking University Law School, and holds secondary appointments at Yale in the History Department and the Jackson School. He has also taught at the Duke University School of Law, the University of Hong Kong, Brown University, and the Tsinghua University School of Law. He serves as co-editor of Studies in Legal History, the book series of the American Society for Legal History (published by Cambridge University Press). He is a regular commentator on law and politics in media outlets, in both English and Chinese.

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.