About the talk:
The first book of its kind, Property Law: Comparative, Empirical, and Economic Analyses, uses a unique hand-coded data set on nearly 300 dimensions on the substance of property law in 156 jurisdictions to describe the convergence and divergence of key property doctrines around the world. This book quantitatively analyzes property institutions and uses machine learning methods to categorize jurisdictions into ten legal families, challenging the existing paradigms in economics and law. Using other cross-country data, the author empirically tests theories about property law and comparative law. Using economic efficiency as both a positive and a normative criterion, each chapter evaluates which jurisdictions have the most efficient property doctrines, concluding that the common law is not more efficient than the civil law. Unlike prior studies on empirical comparative law, this book provides detailed citations to laws in each jurisdiction.

About the Speaker: 
Prof. Yun-chien Chang is Jack G. Clarke Professor in East Asian Law at Cornell Law School and also directs the Clarke Program in East Asian Law & Culture. His current academic interests focus on economic, empirical and comparative analysis of private law (particularly property law), as well as empirical studies of the judicial system. Before moving to Cornell, he was a research professor at Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica, Taiwan and serves as the director of its Empirical Legal Studies Center. He has also served as a visiting professor at New York University, the University of Chicago, St. Gallen University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Haifa University, and Rotterdam Institute of Law and Economics. He has also conducted research at Free University of Berlin, University of Paris II, and University of Tokyo. Prof. Chang is a co-editor of Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and an associate reporter on American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law Fourth, Property. Prof. Chang is president of Asian Law and Economics Association and a director of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies.