Faculty of Law University of Toronto
Globalization, Law & Justice Workshop Series
John Ohnesorge
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Legal Origins and the Tasks of Corporate Law in
Economic Development: A Preliminary Exploration
Thursday, November 12, 2009
4:10 – 6:00 PM
Solarium (room FA2) – Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
Since the 1990s the Legal Origins, or Law and Finance, approach to the comparative study of corporate law has become extremely important, both as a scholarly endeavor, and as a source of policy prescriptions for institutions such as the World Bank that influence legal reform in developing countries. While this school has made valuable contributions, it is now under increasing criticism, usually targeted at its methodology. This paper examines how the influence of the Legal Origins school is exerted through the World Bank's Doing Business project, then raises a series of concerns about the appropriateness of that influence. The concerns raised in this paper are somewhat different than those usually raised against the school, as these concerns are based on a comparative history of corporate law and capitalist development in East Asia and elsewhere, rather than focusing on internal methodological issues such as how various national legal systems should be coded for statistical analysis.
A native of Minneapolis, Professor Ohnesorge received his B.A. degree from St. Olaf College (1985), his J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School (1989), and his S.J.D. from Harvard Law School (2002). Along the way he has spent several years in East Asia, first as a teacher and law student in Shanghai in the 1980s, and then as a lawyer in private practice in Seoul in the 1990s.
During the course of his S.J.D. studies, Professor Ohnesorge spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, on a fellowship from Harvard's Center for European Studies. In 2000 he served as a lecturer at Harvard Law School, co-teaching the Pacific Legal Community seminar with Professor William P. Alford. From 2000 to 2001 he clerked for Federal District Court Judge Rya W. Zobel (D. Mass), then joined the University of Wisconsin Law School faculty in the fall of 2001. Professor Ohnesorge teaches Business Organizations, Administrative Law, Chinese Law, and Law and Modernization, and also serves as Vice Director of the East Asian Legal Studies Center, and as the Co-Chair of the Wisconsin China Initiative.
Refreshments will be served
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
