Center on Global Legal Transformation Marks First Anniversary

Center on Global Legal Transformation Marks First Anniversary

 

Public Affairs, 212-854-2650 or [email protected]

New York, Sept. 7, 2011—The Center on Global Legal Transformation, one of the newest additions to Columbia Law School’s broad range of academic centers and programs, has reached its first anniversary.
 
The center was created last August to examine the impact of new forms of governance and to serve as a think tank for academics from multiple disciplines studying the transformation of law in the context of globalization.
 
Under the direction of Katharina Pistor, the Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law, and an internationally recognized expert on comparative law and governance, the center has forged new approaches for analyzing how globalization has transformed law and markets and forced a reconsideration of issues of governance. Pistor noted that public confidence in markets, regulators, and institutions was shaken at the time the center was launched one year ago. This broad skepticism helped drive research the center undertook to challenge conventional wisdom prevalent in the academy, while examining problems affecting both Wall Street traders and policymakers inside the Washington beltway.
 
“The big debate in law and finance over roughly the past 10 years,” Pistor said, “has been over the correlation between investor rights and the strength of financial markets.” She added that the global financial crisis has “put a dent into the assumption that bigger is always better.” 
 
Pistor encourages lively discussion among the research team assembled under the auspices of the center’s Global Finance and Law Initiative, an interdisciplinary and collaborative research project that has attracted leading scholars of law and social science, in addition to welcoming perspectives from outside academia. The six-month-old initiative received a coveted grant from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a nonprofit organization funded by George Soros to examine the failure of financial and legal models to foresee the current financial crisis or even account for the run up to it and to develop alternative approaches.
 
During its inaugural year, the center also has sponsored a variety of events that brought together thought leaders on critical issues of public policy. In October, for example, its forum on globalizing property rights hosted scholars who traveled from Rome, Leiden, and Herzliya, Israel. The group, including Pistor and postdoctoral research scholars Rachel Harvey and Casey Quinn, engaged in a vibrant discussion ofthe relationship between globalization and property rights.

Pistor is also a member of an interdisciplinary committee on global thought made up of a group of scholars from throughout Columbia University. This collaboration, Pistor said, led to a jointly sponsored colloquium on governing interdependence that held meetings throughout the academic year, primarily featuring Columbia scholars. Invited scholars tackled the question how to govern in a globalizing world but without a central global government, a diverse array of issues, including the regulation of food security, fair trade in the world coffee market, and transnational migration. 

Professionally and personally, Pistor maintains a global perspective, having been born and educated in Germany, as well as England and the U.S. She has studied Russian and Chinese law, and is fluent in German, English, Russian and French.
 
Longstanding interests in transitions and changes impacting different regimes have prepared Pistor to examine the disruptions that have arisen as a result of the global financial crisis. In addition to overseeing the center’s activities, Pistor is also organizing a workshop for late September on “Dividing the Regulatory Space.” She has begun researching a book on governing interdependencies, as she simultaneously prepares to shepherd in the second year of the center, which promises to be stimulating and challenging, as well.
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