PUBLISHED:October 30, 2009

Duke Law in China

Oct. 30, 2009 — Two Duke Law faculty members have traveled to China in recent days to speak at conferences tackling issues surrounding regulation in a post-financial crisis economy and, separately, issues relating to global risk management.

On Oct. 29 and 30, Jerome Reichman, the Bunyan S. Womble Professor of Law, is in Beijing for a meeting of the China Task Force, sponsored by the Institute for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University and headed by Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. The multidisciplinary, high-level meeting brings together law professors and economists to analyze regulation after the financial crisis.

Reichman will present his paper, “Intellectual Property in the 21st Century: Will Developing Countries Lead or Follow?” as part of a discussion of issues relating to the regulation of intellectual property within China’s nascent innovation system. » See the full schedule here.

Jonathan Wiener, the William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law and professor of environmental policy and public policy at Duke, participated in several conferences in China earlier this month discussing risk management in an increasingly international and interconnected world. His talks outlined the sorts of multiple, simultaneous risks that confront the global community — such as climate change, disease, natural disasters, food safety, financial crises, terrorism — and the organizational structures and policies in place or needed to better manage these risks.

On Oct. 16, he presented “Risk Regulation: Law and Governance in a Multirisk World” at Peking University (PKU) Law School; the presentation will be published, in both Chinese and English, in the PKU Law Review.

On Oct. 19, he gave the opening welcome and the keynote address at an international conference on Risk Analysis and Crisis Response (RACR), sponsored by the Risk Analysis Council of China. His address, “Precaution and Oversight in a World of Multiple Risks,” announced the official launch of the new China group of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA), for which Weiner recently concluded a term as president.

While there Wiener also chaired a “Risk Leaders’ Summit” at the conference, at which the presidents of the SRA regions from around the world, including SRA, SRA-China, SRA-Japan, SRA-Europe, SRA-Australia/New Zealand, and an interest group from Korea agreed to the “Beijing Declaration,” a framework for collaboration in promoting excellence in risk analysis around the world. The conference’s proceedings will be published in a volume, New Perspectives on Risk Analysis and Crisis Response, Proceedings of RACR-2009, the Second International Conference on Risk Analysis and Crisis Response (New York & Paris: Atlantis Press, 2009), edited by Chongfu Huang, Jinren Ni and Wiener.

On Oct. 21, Wiener spoke at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Policy and Management Sciences on “Risk Management in a Multirisk World.” While in Beijing, Wiener met with several Duke Law alumni, including Dai Xin ’09, Li Yongyi ’07, Hou Dongfang LLM ’09, and Wang Jianbin LLM ’09.

“Our faculty are highly engaged in a variety of global activities,” says Judith Horowitz, associate dean for international studies. “At any given time, someone is speaking at a conference abroad, advising the government of another country, or participating in international policy discussions. China in particular is developing policies and programs that are in position to benefit from the research and knowledge of our faculty, and it is exciting to see Duke Law faculty and alumni involved in the country’s growth.”

Read more about Duke Law faculty and alumni in China here, here, and in the Fall 2008 edition of the Duke Environmental Law newsletter, which can be downloaded here. Faculty scholarship relating to China can be found through a simple search for “China” in the Duke Law Scholarship Repository here.