U.S.-Asia Law Institute:

Finance Without Law: The Case of China

Tuesday, February 7, 2023
7:30 PM - 8:30 PM (Eastern Time)

via Zoom only

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About the Event

Can a sophisticated financial market exist without legal protections for investors and creditors? International investors have put trillions of dollars into “China concepts stocks” and Chinese-issued international bonds over the past two decades, even though these markets to some extent operate extra-legally. In a new paper, Professor Shitong Qiao examines how this anomalous situation came about and the mechanism by which the Chinese state’s reputation has functioned as an alternative to legal protections. In this talk, he will explain how China governs by extra-legality and suggest that this is a new direction for research by scholars of law, social norms, and development. Professor Roderick Hills, U.S.-Asia Law Institute Faculty Advisor, will moderate.

About the speaker

Shitong Qiao is a law professor and the Ken Young-Gak Yun and Jinah Park Yun Research Scholar at Duke Law School. He was a tenured professor at the University of Hong Kong, a Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) fellow at Princeton University, and the inaugural Jerome A. Cohen Visiting Professor of Law at NYU. He also taught in Shenzhen (Peking University School of Transnational Law) and Shanghai (NYU Shanghai). Professor Qiao is an expert on property and urban law with a focus on comparative law and China. His first monograph, Chinese Small Property: The Co-Evolution of Law and Social Norms, explores the relationship between law and market transition, and has won multiple prizes in the US and Asia. He is working on his second monograph, The Authoritarian Commons, which explores the relationship between law and social transformation. Professor Qiao has also published a number of journal articles in top American and Chinese law journals. Professor Qiao graduated from Wuhan (LL.B.), Peking (MPhil), and Yale (LL.M., J.S.D.). Professor Qiao has served as an expert (witness) on the Chinese property regime in China, Canada, and the US.

About the moderator

Roderick Hills is the William T. Comfort, III Professor of Law and a faculty advisor to NYU’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute. He teaches and writes in public law areas with a focus on the law governing division of powers between central and subcentral governments. These areas include constitutional law, local government law, land use regulation, jurisdiction, and education law. His publications have appeared, among other places, in the Harvard Law Review, Pennsylvania Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Supreme Court Law Review. Hills holds bachelor’s and law degrees from Yale University.