Comparative historian, legal theorist, Chinese law and politics observer @Yale.
Taisu Zhang
Loading...
I’d say something about public international law dying, but the truth of the matter is that it’s been dead for many years by now, and what we’re now seeing is just a public display of the shriveled corpse. It could also be that it was never alive in the first place.
I’ve been trying to stay off social media while trying to finish a batch of article/book revisions, but I really have to say: having rooted for Brazil in every World Cup since 1990, this is, by far, the worst squad I’ve ever seen. It has, what, 1/4 of the talent that the team used to have in 2002?!
First draft completed! The writing took six months, but the substantive research took about 7 years, spanning multiple article and essay projects (none of which will supply actual text for this book, given Harvard UP’s publishing preferences). Should be out at some point in late 2026.
New paper on “Legal Internalism” posted. Co-authored with Shyam Balganesh. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Now that that’s done a couple weeks ahead of schedule, if I owe anyone who sees this a chapter or essay or article draft, I promise I will make significant progress on that during the winter break… and thank you again for being patient with me while I focused on the book. *deep bow*
Just sent the full draft of a new book (on “Legality in China” or “the authoritarian functions of law”) to my editor for peer review and subsequent processing—hopefully in time for the book to come out in a little over a year.
Just a reminder that, since 2009, China has held a military parade in Tiananmen Square roughly once every 5 years to commemorate major anniversaries, and yet in that span it has invaded, bombed, or otherwise militarily attacked exactly 0 countries.
It seems like, well, an opportune time to push this paper again. We find qualitative similarities in how the Chinese and American governments produce economic statistics, but even we couldn’t anticipate how quickly those similarities would strengthen…
The desire to make the RMB internationally attractive partially explains the Chinese government’s continued hesitation to significantly increase the money supply (which then feeds directly into current waves of deflation). I’m not sure that’s worth it. www.economist.com/china/2025/0...
This paper Is finally out! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
