Historical Faculty

Taisu Zhang works on comparative legal history, specifically property rights in modern China and early modern Western Europe, comparative law, property law, and contemporary Chinese law. He joined the Duke Law governing faculty in 2014 after serving as a visiting assistant professor of law since 2012.

Zhang received his B.A. (History and Mathematics, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa), J.D., and Ph.D. in History from Yale University, where he served as articles editor of the Yale Law Journal.  His dissertation, “Kinship Networks, Social Status and the Creation of Property Rights in Pre-Industrial China and England,” has won a number of prizes, including Yale University’s Arthur and Mary Wright Dissertation Prize and the American Society for Legal History’s Kathryn T. Preyer Award.

Zhang has recently published in the American Journal of Comparative Law, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and the Columbia Journal of Asian Law.  He has taught at Brown University, Yale, and the Peking University Law School.  He has also worked at the Institute of Applied Legal Studies of the Supreme People’s Court of China, Davis Polk & Wardwell, and the Federal Defenders of New York.  In 2016 Zhang rejoined the faculty at Yale.