Back to News

Scholarship by Professors Morley and Zhang Wins Awards

side by side pictures of Taisu Zhang and John Morley
Professors Taisu Zhang (left) and John D. Morley (right)

Professor of Law Taisu Zhang ’08 has received the Allan Sharlin Memorial Book Award from the Social Science History Association (SSHA) for his book “The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions.” 

The award, given annually for an outstanding book in social science history, was presented at the recent 2024 SSHA conference in Toronto. Zhang shared the prize with “Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State,” by Anna Grzymala-Busse of Stanford University.

The citation for the prize praised Zhang’s book — part of a planned trilogy — as “a powerful study that melds intellectual history, a Weberian sensibility regarding the power of particular carrier groups, and a careful-yet-surprising history of one of the key transformations of the world polity in the 19th century.”

Zhang, along with Augustus E. Lines Professor of Law John D. Morley ’06, received the 2023 Legal History Article of the Year Prize from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation for an article they co-authored in The Yale Law Journal, titled “The Modern State and the Rise of the Business Corporation.”

In the article, Morley and Zhang tackle a longstanding debate about the origins of the business corporation. Through the examples of six historical societies, including late imperial China, the early United States, the 19th century Ottoman Empire, and others, they show that pooling of strangers into a single enterprise — typified by the modern business corporation — “requires the support of a powerful state with the geographical reach, coercive force, administrative power, and legal capacity necessary to enforce the law uniformly among the corporation’s various owners.”

At the Law School, Zhang works on comparative legal and economic history, private law theory, and contemporary Chinese law and politics.

Morley is a leading expert on the regulation and structure of investment funds, including mutual funds, private equity funds and hedge funds.