Law as Infrastructure: China in the World

Date: Thursday, October 10, 2024

Time: 7-8 pm (Eastern)

Place: Furman 110 and on zoom

About the event

Private law scholars have viewed Anglo-American common law as the core infrastructure of modern capitalism the world over. But what happens when rising powers like China with very different legal and political systems begin investing abroad on a vast scale? Our speaker, Matthew Erie, associate professor at the University of Oxford, responded to this question by launching a six-year project, called China, Law, and Development, and inviting scholars around the world to participate in gathering empirical evidence about the legal underpinnings of China’s worldwide investments, and whether or how China has disrupted prior assumptions about the relationship between law and development. In this talk, he will introduce the concept of “law as infrastructure” to make sense of the strategies and challenges of the People’s Republic of China. Rather than a “clash of civilizations” or a world remade in China’s image, law as infrastructure points to a process of layering, assembling, and bundling different laws and legal regimes including new law that is integrated within existing frameworks, epistemic communities, and institutions, as well as the creation of new infrastructures in emerging sectors such as renewable energy. Chinese law as global infrastructure has implications not only for commercial transactions but also for core fundamentals of public ordering, including rights, equity, and justice, in China and beyond.

About the speaker:

Matthew S. Erie is an associate professor, member of the Law Faculty, and associate research fellow of the Socio-Legal Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. Professor Erie's research reflects his training as a lawyer and anthropologist, and lies at two intersections: the first is between Anglo-American common law and Asian law and the second is between law and the social sciences. His work addresses such issues as law and capitalism, global (dis)orders, comparative international law, socio-legal methods and theories, and China. His current research project China, Law and Development, funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant (€1.5 million), examines China’s approach to international law and the legal and regulatory systems of host states receiving Chinese capital. He is currently working on a number of book projects that grow out of this project. Professor Erie has taught law in the US, UK, China, Singapore, Pakistan, and Cambodia. He has taught or visited at NYU Law School and University, University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, and George Washington University Law School. He practiced law in the New York and Beijing offices of Paul Hastings LLP where he focused on corporate real estate transactions and white-collar investigations (e.g., FCPA). He holds degrees from Cornell University (Ph.D., Anthropology), University of Pennsylvania (J.D.), Tsinghua University Law School (LL.M.), and Dartmouth College (B.A).