Taisu Zhang is a professor of law at Yale Law School and works on legal and economic history, comparative law, private law theory, and contemporary Chinese law and politics. He is the author of three books: "Legality in China" (Harvard University Press, forthcoming, spring 2027), "The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions" (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and "The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England" (Cambridge University Press, 2017). "Legality in China" examines the political and socioeconomic logic of legalization in modern China. "Ideological Foundations" and "Laws and Economics" are the first two entries in a planned trilogy of books on the institutional and cultural origins of early modern economic divergence. The final book in that trilogy, tentatively titled "Culture, Law, and Economic Divergence," is in progress. Zhang's academic articles and essays have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Legal Analysis, the Yale Law Journal, and the Harvard Law Review. His books and articles have won a number of awards, including, most recently, the Allan Sharlin Memorial Book Award from the Social Science History Association and the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Legal History Article of the Year Prize.
Zhang is a global faculty member at Peking University Law School, and holds secondary appointments at Yale in the History Department and the Jackson School. 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). He is a regular commentator on law and politics in media outlets, in both English and Chinese.
