Faculty & Research
The faculty of Duke Law School is made up of innovative and influential scholars who are also passionate, creative, and caring teachers.
Duke Law professors are leaders in a broad range of fields and highly regarded for their research, writing, and public service. A community of scholars, they are collegial, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, and many hold joint appointments or collaborate with colleagues in other Duke schools and departments.
They also care deeply about helping students learn, both in the classroom and beyond, devote substantial time to students' academic and professional development, and continue to celebrate successes and provide counsel through difficult times once students become practicing lawyers.
The deep and ongoing engagement of our faculty with the subjects that they study and teach and the students they mentor creates an intellectual excitement that is palpable in our classrooms and hallways and is the foundation for an atmosphere of collaboration and respect that defines our school culture.
Qiao proposes creating new property rights for Hong Kong residents to ease the city's housing scarcity and give citizens a stake in its development
In a new paper, "Land Options for Housing: How New Property Rights Can Break Old Land Monopolies," Professor of Law Shitong Qiao assesses how property law has enabled monopolistic ownership of urban real estate in Hong Kong, creating the world's least affordable housing market, and proposes a solution that would reallocate property rights to individuals and give residents a stake in the city's future development.
Qiao, who joined the Duke Law faculty in August 2021, is an expert on property and urban law with a focus on comparative law and China. He is the Ken Young-Gak Yun and Jinah Park Yun Research Scholar. The paper was co-written with Roderick M. Hills, Jr. of New York University School of Law.
The paper addresses Hong Kong's real estate paradox: While its housing market has been the least affordable in the world for a decade, and residents are crammed into an average living area of about 215 square feet per person, the city has plenty of buildable land currently going undeveloped. Less than a quarter of Hong Kong’s land is built up, with the rest consisting of woodlands, shrublands, and grasslands.
In the paper, Qiao and Hills suggest that the government could end the stranglehold of monopoly ownership and housing scarcity by creating entirely new property rights around which new interest groups could form. By giving every Hong Kong resident “land options for housing (LOH)," they write, the government could create a competitive market for development rights that simultaneously ends the gridlock of monopoly and creates a new constituency to lobby for more housing. Under the proposal, property owners would compete with each other to purchase LOHs from LOH holders in order to build high-density housing. Such a system would simultaneously give the LOH holders a stake in moving land from low-value to high-value uses while providing ample compensation to existing stakeholders.
New paper co-authored by Wiener proposes a risk-risk framework to inform decision-making on solar radiation modification
A new paper co-authored by Professor Jonathan Wiener argues that employing a risk-risk framework in policy analysis and decision-making concerning solar radiation modification (SRM) can help focus climate change risk management on broader societal objectives, rather than on temperature goals alone, in a world that overshoots agreed temperature goals.
Published by the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, Solar Radiation Modification: A Risk-Risk Analysis states that policymaking regarding SRM should compare its effects on multiple risks as part of a policy portfolio that also takes into account emissions reductions, carbon dioxide removal, and adaptation.
Wiener is the William R. & Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law, with appointments at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Sanford School of Public Policy as a professor of environmental policy and public policy, and co-directs the Duke Center on Risk.
He is author of the book Risk vs. Risk (Harvard University Press, 1995) which developed the risk-risk framework applied in the new paper, co-written with Matthew Brune and Tyler Felgenhauer of the Duke Center on Risk; Mark E. Borsuk of the Pratt School of Engineering and Duke Center on Risk; Govindasamy Bala of the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Indian Institute of Science; Inés Camilloni of the Universidad de Buenos Aires; and Jianhua Xu of Peking University, China.