St Cross Fellow and Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies Dr Matthew Erie has been awarded a 2018 Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship. The award of $42,000 was given for his project "Illiberal Law and Development: China and the World", which was one of 14 selected out of more than 130 preliminary pre-proposals. The Fellowship will fund Dr Erie's research on the role of law in China's cross-border investment and finance projects and explore what this may tell us about law and development.
Rather than conceptualising China’s impacts as one of model imposition, China’s omnipresence in development demonstrates a convergence with protectionism, nativism, and de-democratisation in the US, UK, and the EU, the proponents of law and development in yesteryears. To understand this convergence, this project introduces a novel heuristic: legal hubs, sub-national jurisdictions with concentrations of legal services and a variety of dispute resolution mechanisms that function to facilitate cross-border transactions. The project examines the emergence of inter-Asian legal hubs, which are orienting their legal services towards (or from within) China, as windows into the evolving landscape of dispute resolution under international commercial law.
The SSRC Fellowships aim to strengthen the understanding of issues and geographies that do not fit neatly into existing divisions of academia, and to develop new approaches, practices and opportunities in international, regional and area studies. They provide the opportunity to establish structures for linking scholars across disciplines in the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as supporting and promoting excellence.
Ella Bedrock
Thursday 12 April 2018
