Taisu Zhang is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School and works on comparative legal and economic history, private law theory, and contemporary Chinese law and politics. He is the author of two books, The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions (Cambridge University Press, Fall 2022), and The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
These are the first two entries in a planned trilogy of books on the institutional and cultural origins of early modern economic divergence. The final entry, tentatively titled The Cultural and Legal Origins of Economic Divergence: China and the World, 1700 to 1984, is currently in progress. The Laws and Economics of Confucianism received the 2018 Presidents Award from the Social Science History Association and the 2018 Gaddis Smith Book Prize from the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. In addition, Zhang has published articles, essays, and book chapters on a wide array of topics, winning awards from several academic organizations, and is a regular commentator on Chinese law, society, and politics in media outlets.
Zhang is a Global Faculty member at Peking University Law School, and holds a secondary appointment at Yale as Professor of History. He has also taught at the Duke University School of Law, the University of Hong Kong, Brown University, and the Tsinghua University School of Law. He serves as co-editor of Studies in Legal History, the book series of the American Society for Legal History (published by Cambridge University Press).
The MPI-TAU Transnational Legal History Workshop is hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, the David Berg Foundation Institute of Law and History at Tel Aviv University, and the Faculty of Law at Goethe University Frankfurt.