Katharina Pistor

Katharina Pistor is Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, Director of the School’s Center on Global Legal Transformation and serves as a member of Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought. She previously taught at the Kennedy School of Government, and worked at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany and the Harvard Institute for International Development. Her research focuses on the development of legal institutions in the context of social and economic transformations. In the 1990s Dr. Pistor worked predominantly on transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, where she conducted extensive field research. Since then, her research had expanded to other emerging markets (in East Asia) and the impact of globalization on the transformation of law and legal institutions. Dr. Pistor is the Principal Investigator of the “Global Finance and Law Initiative”, a collaborative research project aimed at re-conceptualizing the relation of finance to law, a project funded by INET.

Recent publications include “Governing Financial Interdependence: Lessons from the Vienna Initiative” (Journal of Globalization and Development, 2011); “Global Network Finance” (Journal of Comparative Economics, 2009); and with Curtis Milhaupt, “Law and Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic Development Around the World” (Chicago University Press 2008).