Faculty Spotlight: Professor Taisu Zhang ’08

Taisu Zhang, who graduated from Yale Law School in 2008, specializes in comparative legal and economic history, private law theory, and contemporary Chinese law and politics. At Yale, he teaches courses on property and Chinese law at the Law School as well as other subjects in the Department of History and at the Jackson School of Global Affairs. In addition to his faculty appointments, he serves as co-editor of Studies in Legal History and is working on the third installment of his book series on the origins of economic divergence in China. 

An online book symposium in September 2024 gathered scholars from around the world to discuss his 2023 book, The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation, the second volume of a planned trilogy. 

The book “is yet another reminder of what a pioneering and innovative academic Professor Zhang is,” Dean Heather K. Gerken said in remarks at the conference. Zhang’s work “transcends traditional academic boundaries, not only advancing our understanding of Chinese legal and fiscal history but also providing frameworks that invite interdisciplinary dialogue,” she said.

In this Q&A, Zhang reflects on his interdisciplinary approach to law, his affinity for faculty life, and the progress of his latest book.

In addition to holding a J.D. from the Law School, you also have a Ph.D. in history from Yale and teach in the Department of History and at the Jackson School of Global Affairs. What inspired you to enroll in law school and pursue a career in legal academia, and how do your various scholarly interests intersect in your work? 

Looking back, at least part of my decision to apply to law school was driven by my lack of commitment to one particular intellectual methodology or field of work — law school, especially Yale Law School, seemed like a way to explore career and research options without closing off too many possibilities. This meant, of course, that I harbored many unrealistic assumptions about what legal systems and legal careers could accomplish — assumptions that were dispatched within a few months of starting law school. Nonetheless, the subject matter proved intellectually stimulating enough that I stuck with it, at least as a research focus.

The decision to work in legal academia, as opposed to other branches of academia, was again partially driven by a lack of commitment to one particular methodology. The top American law schools, and especially Yale, permit true interdisciplinarity in theory and method, far beyond what any other field, or even law schools of any other country, can tolerate or facilitate. This allows the scholars here to ask and sometimes answer truly big questions about social, economic, and political life. Those questions rarely, if ever, can be usefully examined through only one kind of intellectual methodology or one kind of theoretical paradigm.

If there’s one defining feature of my academic career — which admittedly is still in its early stages — I hope it will be that I let my questions and interests determine my methodology and theoretical toolkit, rather than the other way around. I want to ask the really big questions about human history and institutions, and if they can only be answered, however tentatively, through a hodgepodge of methods and frameworks that do not always fit perfectly together and regularly force me beyond my preexisting comfort zones, then so be it. 

How do you compare your experiences at Yale Law School as a student to your time as a faculty member? 

The YLS student body is considerably more intellectually oriented than the student body of any other law school, but it still is composed primarily of future politicians, civil servants, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and so on. Aspiring academics are a minority of any student class, as I suppose they must be. 

I have always been, for better or for worse and sometimes without fully realizing it, on a primarily academic life trajectory, so honestly I feel much more comfortable on the faculty than I did as a student, even though the latter was a vastly less stressful experience. This is not to say that law student life was unpleasant — quite the opposite, it was some of the more carefree years of my life — but the fact that I was surrounded by people who cared about very different things than I did could create a bit of social pressure on someone in his early 20s. In contrast, the faculty have much more in common with each other, and there’s perhaps a greater sense of common purpose.

You’ve authored two books as part of a trilogy on the institutional and cultural origins of early modern economic divergence and are currently working on the final installment tentatively titled The Cultural-Legal Origins of Economic Divergence. What inspired you to write the series, and can you talk about the planned third volume? 

This is what I mean by letting questions drive my methods and theoretical frameworks. I began my intellectual career — which probably started in earnest some time in my third year of law school — with a strong interest in the “Great Divergence question”: why China economically fell behind the West in the 18th and 19th centuries. This is probably the single most important and most heavily studied question in modern global history, and it was, of course, rather foolish for a graduate student to set his sights on it. Nonetheless, I eventually managed to break up the question into more manageable chunks, and used one of those chunks — land transactions and agrarian inequality — as the basis of my dissertation, which eventually came out in late 2017 as a book. It was, methodologically, a wider-ranging book than most history monographs, but still largely stuck to some combination of legal history, institutional economics, and social norms theory as its primary engines.

By the second book, which looks at fiscal institutions and was published in 2023, the scope of inquiry had reached far beyond what traditional historical and economic methods could meaningfully pursue, and so I had to develop some additional fluency in certain branches of political theory and social psychology. The end result is a sort of intellectual chimera: it combines a large amount of intellectual, political, and legal history with multiple theoretical frameworks about ideological and institutional change all stacked on top of each other.

The third book, which finally tackles the “Great Divergence question” head-on, needs to pull all of this into a coherent argument. This will focus first on the capital accumulation prerequisites to industrialization, then on the institutional prerequisites — property rights, fiscal regimes, and capital market institutions — for capital accumulation, and finally on what I see as the cultural/ideological prerequisites to those institutional conditions. The book therefore goes back to the kind of institutional economics that drove my dissertation research, but then moves aggressively beyond that to various kinds of systems theory. There are many days when I look at the entire range of things that need to be done in this book, and feel a deep sense of relief that I work at YLS, where tolerance for this kind of jack-of-all-trades holistic research is much higher than, for example, what nearly any history department can muster these days. 

All that said, the completion of this third book is currently being somewhat delayed by a number of article-length projects that stemmed from theoretical ideas and interests — on, say, the information production capacity of states, and the development of intellectual coherence across large collections of experts — that arose during the writing of the second book. That is, perhaps, one of the downsides of having a multi-disciplinary approach: you sometimes get drawn into more projects than you can anticipate. Hopefully, I can finish all these article projects within the next year or 18 months, and maybe even substantially draw on them when finishing the third book.

What do you feel is important in teaching the next generation of lawyers, practitioners, and legal academics?

Well, different people will have different priorities on this. Mine is to offer our students a more wide-ranging and global perspective that hopefully alerts them to the often-intense intellectual narrowness and parochialism of the American perspective. I would never assume that this should be the primary goal of an American law school, not even YLS, but on a faculty full of top experts on American law, politics, and socioeconomics, having some people push a global and comparative perspective seems strictly necessary. Despite current narratives of American imperial decline, the United States will remain a dominant global power far into the future, and its next generation of policymakers, lawyers, and academics needs to have at least some ability to step out of their own professional, intellectual, and even moral comfort zones and see things from the other side. In fact, the more the imperial decline narratives prove correct, the more they will need that ability.