HLS Professor David Kennedy ’80, Faculty Director of the new Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School, co-chaired a major conference on financial regulation in China on October 29 and 30, at Peking University in Beijing.
The conference, which was titled “Meeting of the China Task Force: Regulation After the Crisis,” brought together Chinese and Western scholars and Chinese policymakers to discuss regulation in China after the economic crisis.
“We had a serious and engaged discussion among leading policy and academic voices about what can be learned from Chinese economic development so far, and how, at both the national and global level, we ought to deal with the economic imbalances which have been placed front and center by the economic crisis,” said Kennedy, who co-chaired the conference with Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University and co-president of Columbia’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue.
The conference was part of an ongoing series of meetings of the China Task Force, a group of scholars and policymakers who meet regularly to discuss China’s developing market economy and the legal and political institutions that must be developed to support China’s economic transition.
The conference was co-sponsored by the Institute for Global Law and Policy, which was founded at HLS to foster research and policy dialog about the structure and potential for global governance and international law affecting the most pressing issues of global policy, ranging from armed conflict and humanitarian cooperation to foreign investment and economic development.
Kennedy re-joined the HLS faculty in 2009 to direct the institute, after having left HLS in 2008 to serve as vice president for international affairs at Brown University. During his previous tenure at HLS, Kennedy served as chair of the graduate committee and faculty director of International Legal Studies. He also founded and directed the European Law Research Center at Harvard. He is an expert in international law, international economic policy, legal theory, law and development and European law.