Taisu Zhang is a professor of law at Yale Law School (effective July 2019) and works on comparative legal and economic history, private law theory, property law, and contemporary Chinese law and politics. The locus of his research is the Sino-Western economic divergence (the “Great Divergence”) of the 18th to early 20th centuries: its institutional, cultural, and ideological origins, as well as its sociopolitical ramifications.
Dr. Zhang’s first book, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, and has received the Presidents Book Award from the Social Science History Association and the Gaddis Smith Book Prize from the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. In dissertation form, it was the recipient of Yale University’s Arthur and Mary Wright Dissertation Prize and the American Society for Legal History’s Kathryn T. Preyer Award. A second book, The Ideological Foundations of the Qing Fiscal State, is in progress. He has also published a number of articles and essays in academic journals and popular outlets.
Dr. Zhang is a member of the Global Faculty of the Peking University School of Law, and is the current president of the International Society for Chinese Law and History. Prior to joining the Yale faculty as associate professor in 2016, he was an associate professor at the Duke University School of Law, and has also taught at Brown University, the Tsinghua University School of Law, and the University of Hong Kong. Dr. Zhang holds three degrees from Yale: a B.A. in history and mathematics (2005), a J.D. (2008), and a Ph.D. in history (2014). While in graduate school, he interned periodically at the Supreme People’s Court of China.