In this talk Professor Kjaer wishes to present two tales of the law of political economy and that in a twofold sense. First in the sense of a ‘culturalist’ versus a ‘market’ oriented version of the law of political economy. Secondly, through a focus on European versus US-American approaches to ‘law of political’. In both cases, substantially different epistemological and methodological starting points lead to very different insights into what the law of political economy is all about.

The presentation will draw upon but also expand insights originally presented in the introductory chapter of Poul F. Kjaer (ed.): The Law of Political Economy: Transformation in the Function of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

About the Speaker

Poul F. Kjaer. Is professor of Governance and Sociology of Law at the Department of Business Humanities, Copenhagen Business School. His research focuses on public and private global governance and political economy and European integration, governance and political economy from a legal theory and historical sociology of law angle.

He is currently directing the European Research Council Advanced Grant project ‘Global Value Chain Law: Constituting Connectivity, Contracts and Corporations’ He previously directed the European Research Council project ‘Institutional Transformation in European Political Economy – A Socio-legal Approach’.

Poul has degrees in law, sociology and political science including a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and a Habilitation from the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. He has been visiting fellow at several research institutions including the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, London School of Economics and Political Science, Sciences Po Law School, and Harvard University. He currently visiting professor at University of Amsterdam Law School.

Capitalism is a system and like other complex systems, it follows different laws of expansion, reproduction, and contraction than single assets. Dissecting the legal modules of capital assets, therefore, is only the first step in deciphering the nature of capitalist law, which is the purpose of my new book project. It requires lifting the gaze from the micro-institutional level where capital is coded as one asset and one transaction at a time, to the operation of capitalism and the forces that define and drive it. These forces can be summarized as (1) privileging private over public ordering, (2) empowering private actors, (3) enabling them to employ the state’s coercive powers, and (4) under-writing legal arbitrage in the name of capital even when this violates the purpose for which law was enacted. 

Katharina Pistor is a leading scholar and writer on corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, and comparative law and legal institutions.

She is the author or co-author of nine books. Her most recent book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, examines how assets such as land, private debt, business organizations, or knowledge are transformed into capital through contract law, property rights, collateral law, and trust, corporate, and bankruptcy law. The Code of Capital was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Financial Times and Business Insider. 

Pistor publishes widely in legal and social science journals. In her essay “From Territorial to Monetary Sovereignty” in the Journal on Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2017), she argued that the rise of a global money system means a new definition of sovereignty: the control of money. She has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Comparative Law, Columbia Journal of European Law, European Business Organization Law Review, and Journal of Institutional Economics. 

Pistor is a prominent commentator on cryptocurrency and has testified before Congress on the lack of regulatory oversight of proposed international cryptocurrencies. As the director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation, Pistor directs the center’s work to develop research projects and organize conferences to examine ways in which law shapes global relations and how they, in turn, transform the law. 

Before joining Columbia Law School in 2001, Pistor held teaching and research positions at Harvard Law School, the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Law in Hamburg. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, New York University School of Law, Frankfurt University, London School of Economics, and Oxford University. 

She is a research associate with the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and she has served as principal investigator of the Global Finance and Law Initiative (2011–2013). Pistor was a member of the board of directors (2011–2014) and a fellow (2019) of the European Corporate Governance Institute. In 2015, she was elected a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and in 2021, she was elected a member of the European Academy of Sciences.

In 2012 she was co-recipient (with Martin Hellwig) of the Max Planck Research Award on international financial regulation, and in 2014, she received the Allen & Overy Prize for best working paper on law of the European Corporation Governance Institute. She is also the recipient of research grants by the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the National Science Foundation.

We use large language models to identify canons of statutory interpretation over the entire life of the Supreme Court, in order to discover previously unknown canons, track canon use at the court, and identify the conditions under which canons are applied. The paper makes methodological contributions to the study of large legal datasets as well as substantive contributions to the field of statutory interpretation.

About the Speaker

Jonathan H. Choi is a professor of law at USC Gould School of Law. He specializes in law and artificial intelligence (applying natural language processing to study legal issues), tax law and statutory interpretation. His work has appeared in the New York University Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, the Yale Journal on Regulation and the Yale Law Journal, among others. His work has been covered by a wide variety of news outlets, including ABC News, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, the Daily Mail, Fox News, NBC Nightly News, the New Yorker, Reuters, the Star Tribune, and the Washington Post.

Choi graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College, with a triple major in computer science, economics and philosophy and earned high honors for his computer science thesis. He earned a JD at the Yale Law School, where he was the executive bluebook editor of the Yale Law Journal and a founding co-director of the Yale Journal on Regulation Online. Before entering academia, he practiced tax law at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York. He previously taught at the University of Minnesota Law School.

The Indian Supreme Court was established nearly seventy-five years ago as a core part of India’s constitutional project. Does the Court live up to the ideals of justice imagined by the framers of the Indian Constitution? Critics of the Supreme Court point out that it takes too long to adjudicate cases, a select group of senior advocates exercise disproportionate influence on the outcome of cases, the Chief Justice of India strategically assigns cases with an eye to outcome, and the self-appointments process-known as the collegium-is just another ‘old boy’s network’. Building on nearly a decade of original empirical research, this book examines these and other controversies plaguing the Supreme Court today. The authors provide an overview of the Supreme Court and its processes which are often shrouded in mystery, and present data-driven suggestions for improving the effectiveness and integrity of the Court.

Professor Sital Kalantry is a tenured professor, associate dean, and founder of the India Center. She is an expert in comparative law, business and human rights, feminist legal theory, and contract law. Her latest book, Court on Trial, published by Penguin Press, uses originally developed data to improve transparency and the function of the court. Her prior book, Women’s Rights and Migration, explores the consequences of the use of acontextual information to develop laws relating to reproduction in the United States. She has written over a dozen articles and book chapters that have been published in major legal journals such as the Cornell Law Review and the Stanford International Law Journal as well as peer-reviewed social sciences journals including the Forum for Health Economics and Policy. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Slate, and the Hill (among others). She is a regular media commentator on reproductive rights, law in India, and human rights issues. Her writing has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and Indian Supreme Court.

Professor Kalantry teaches business and human rights, comparative constitutional law, and contract law. Her teaching is informed by her scholarship as well as her seven years of experience as a corporate lawyer at two major U.S. law firms, Milbank and O’Melveny & Myers, and by her litigation experience in international and foreign courts, including the Indian Supreme Court, Inter-American Court of Human Rights and Constitutional Court of Colombia.

She founded the Cornell International Human Rights Clinic, the University of Chicago International Human Rights Clinic, the Avon Global Center for Women & Justice at Cornell Law School, the Cornell India Law Center, and the India Center for Law and Justice at Seattle University School of Law. She is the founding faculty director of an online Master’s in Legal Studies Program at Cornell Law School. In that role, she designed the curriculum, recruited tenured and adjunct professors to teach courses, created admissions criteria, and coordinated with instructional designers and other administrators for this new master's program at Cornell Law School.

She has won awards for her book, for her public interest work (from the South Asian Bar Association), and for her mentorship and support to women students at Cornell University. She has received several grants, including a $1.5 million grant to start the Avon Center for Women and Justice, a grant from NYC Visioning Committee, and teaching innovation grant. She received the Fulbright Scholarship to teach at Jindal Global Law School in India and to conduct empirical research on the Indian Supreme Court.

Professor Kalantry has degrees from Cornell University (A.B.), the London School of Economics (MsC), and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School (J.D).

Social science evidence has played a significant role in American law since Louis Brandeis argued the case of Muller v Oregon in 1907. Today, social science evidence is frequently offered in court for one of three reasons. First, social science evidence is offered to determine disputed facts in a specific case (e.g., to identify the extent of consumer confusion in a trademark case). Second, social science evidence is invoked when courts create new law (e.g., law regarding the segregation of public schools by race or by gender). Finally, social science evidence is used to provide an empirically valid estimate of a legally relevant outcome (e.g., the likelihood that a person charged with one crime will commit another crime if released on bail). Each of these three outcomes will be described in Professor Monahan’s remarks.

About the Speaker

John Monahan, a psychologist, teaches and writes about how courts use behavioral science evidence, violence risk assessment, criminology and mental health law. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on the National Research Council. Monahan was the founding president of the American Psychological Association’s Division of Psychology and Law and has been a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He also has been a visiting fellow at several law schools — including Harvard, Stanford, New York University and the University of California, Berkeley — as well as at the American Academy in Rome, and at All Souls College, Oxford. He twice directed research networks for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 1997, he received an honorary law degree from the City University of New York.

Monahan is the author or editor of 17 books and more than 300 articles and chapters. His work has been cited more than 30,000 times. One of his books, Social Science in Law, co-authored with Laurens Walker, is now in its 10th edition and has been translated into Chinese. Two of his other books won the Manfred Guttmacher Award of the American Psychiatric Association for outstanding research in law and psychiatry. Monahan’s work has been cited frequently by courts, including the California Supreme Court in the landmark case of Tarasoff v. Regents, and the U.S. Supreme Court in Barefoot v. Estelle, in which he was referred to as “the leading thinker on the issue” of violence risk assessment.