Abstract:

In less than three decades, Taiwan has transformed from a repressive, authoritarian state into a vibrant democracy. Changes to the legal system, and particularly the criminal justice system, have played a central role in this story. Reform-minded politicians, lawyers, judges, prosecutors, and scholars have been crucial advocates for strengthening human rights protections, as has Taiwan’s Constitutional Court. Since the end of martial law, the Court has vigorously given heft to rights enshrined in the Republic of China’s constitution. Now that Taiwan has adopted the contents of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as domestic law, it is an opportune moment to reflect on Taiwan’s journey towards embracing international human rights norms and to confront remaining challenges. The situation across the strait is markedly different. Today, Taiwan’s Constitutional Court has no counterpart on the Mainland and analogues to Taiwan’s former police-controlled punishments remain in full effect. As calls for reform on the Mainland become increasingly vocal, how might Taiwan’s experience inform efforts to increase human rights protections in the People’s Republic of China? 

Speaker Bio:

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Maggie Lewis joined Seton Hall Law School as an Associate Professor in 2009. She is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Public Intellectuals Program Fellow with the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and an Affiliated Scholar of NYU School of Law’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute. Her recent publications have appeared in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, Columbia Journal of Asian Law, and Virginia Journal of International Law. She is also the co-author of the book Challenge to China: How Taiwan Abolished Its Version of Re-Education Through Labor with Jerome A. Cohen. 

Most recently before joining Seton Hall, Professor Lewis served as a Senior Research Fellow at NYU School of Law’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute where she worked on criminal justice reforms in China. Following graduation from law school, she worked as an associate at the law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York City. She then served as a law clerk for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Diego. After clerking, she returned to NYU School of Law and was awarded a Furman Fellowship.

Professor Lewis received her J.D., magna cum laude, from NYU School of Law, where she was inducted into the Order of the Coif and was a member of Law Review. She received her B.A., summa cum laude, from Columbia University. In addition, she has studied at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, China, and Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany. 

Faculty and students of Peking University have been at the forefront of China’s modern history.  The social impact of the university has been enormous.  Its educational philosophy needs to continually evolve, especially as China has developed in the last few decades at historically unprecedented rates.  President Wang will discuss these changes, how the university copes with new challenges, and how the globalization of Peking University fits into his vision for the future.

Wang Enge was appointed President of Peking University in 2013. He obtained his B.S. and M.S. in theoretical physics from Liaoning University in 1982 and 1985 respectively and received his Ph.D. from Peking University in 1990. He served as Director of the Institute of Physics (CAS) (1999-2007), Founding Director of the International Center for Quantum Structures (2000), Director of the Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics (2004-2009), CAS Deputy Secretary-General (2008-2009), and Executive President of CAS Graduate University (2008-2009).  President Wang is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), as well as a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics (UK). He has been a JSPS professor of Tohoku University (Japan), an AvH Scholar of Fritz-Haber Institute der MPG (Germany), a KITP Visiting Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA), a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (USA), a Visiting Professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Italy), and a GCEP Scholar at Stanford University.

A reception will follow immediately afer this talk

Please note that this event is from 3:30-5:00pm. 

About the Topic: This presentation will describe a pilot program being developed by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for the Prevention of Genocide (CPG) that will give policy makers, analysts, advocates, journalists, scholars, students, and the public at large reliable, up-to-date forecasts of the risk of mass atrocities in countries worldwide. The central aim of this program is to enhance efforts to prevent atrocities by giving concerned actors better risk assessments with more lead time. The CPG expects to launch this pilot program in early 2014.

About the Speaker: Jay Ulfelder is an independent consultant and owner of the blog, The Dart-Throwing Chimp. From 2001 until 2011, he served as research director for the Political Instability Task Force, a U.S. government-funded research program that aims to forecast and explain various forms of political change in countries worldwide. Ulfelder's research interests include democratization, political violence, social unrest, state collapse, and forecasting. His publications include Dilemmas of Democratic Consolidation: A Game-Theory Approach and “Democratic Transitions” in The Routledge Handbook of Democratization and co-authored “A Global Model for Forecasting Political Instability” in the American Journal of Political Science. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 1997 and his B.A. in Comparative Area Studies--USSR and Eastern Europe from Duke University in 1991. 

This seminar is part of the "Europe and the Global Economy" series.

The study of the political consequences of unemployment has a long history in political science. Regarding the electoral impact of unemployment, studies have focused both on its impact on political alienation, as well as its partisan effects. The financial crisis, which unfolded following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and rapidly spread to Europe, provides us with the opportunity to make several methodological improvements over the previous literature. In our empirical analysis, we use fine-grained registry-based data on the economic impact of the crisis and how it varied across Sweden’s more than 5000 electoral districts. We combine this with district-level data on vote-shares for all major parties in parliamentary elections before and after the crisis.

The economic impact varied a great deal across Sweden, mainly affecting industrial centers. Because the impact was so diverse across electoral districts, we are able to estimate the electoral impact of unemployment more efficiently than most previous studies. Moreover, the sources of the crisis were not domestic. Because the crisis was an exogenous shock to the Swedish economy, the selection bias that is usually inherent in estimating the electoral impact of unemployment is mitigated. According to the results, the electoral impact of crisis-induced unemployment was large, leading to a marked fall in the vote share of the established left parties and a corresponding increase in that of the main radical right party.

Kåre Vernby is Associate Professor at the Department of Government, Uppsala University, where he teaches courses in comparative politics and methods.  His research interests are in political economy and political behavior and his papers have been published or are forthcoming in academic journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, European Union Politics and Politics & Society as well as several edited volumes. 

This seminar is part of the "Europe and the Global Economy" series.

How do geopolitical forces influence international capital markets? In particular, do market actors condition their responses to crisis lending initiatives on the political incentives of major lenders? In this paper, Randall Stone and co-writers Terrence Chapman, Songying Fang and Xin Li  analyze a formal model which demonstrates that the effect of crisis lending announcements on international investment flows is conditional on how market actors interpret the political and economic motivations behind lending decisions on the part of the lender and borrower. If investors believe the decision to accept crisis lending is a sign of economic weakness and lending decisions are influenced by the political interests of the major donor countries, then crisis lending may not reduce borrowing costs or quell fears of international investors. On the other hand, if market actors believe that crisis lending programs, and attendant austerity conditions, will significantly reduce the risk of a financial crisis, they may respond with increased private investment, creating a "catalytic effect."  In this model, the political biases of key lending countries can affect the inferences market actors draw, because some sovereign lenders have strategic interests in ensuring that certain borrowing countries do not collapse under the strain of economic crisis. Although this theory applies to multiple types of crisis lending, it helps explain discrepant empirical findings about market reactions to IMF programs. The implications of their theory is tested by examining how sovereign bond yields are affected by IMF program announcements, loan size, the scope of conditions attached to loans, and measures of the geopolitical interests of the United States, a key IMF principal.

Randall Stone (Ph.D. 1993, Harvard) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester.  His research is in international political economy and combines formal theory, quantitative methods, and qualitative fieldwork.  He is the author of Controlling Institutions:  International Organizations and the Global Economy (Cambridge University Press 2011), Lending Credibility:  The International Monetary Fund and the Post-Communist Transition (Princeton University Press, 2002) and Satellites and Commissars:  Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade  (Princeton University Press, 1996), as well as articles in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Review of International Organizations, and Global Environmental Politics.  He has been awarded grants by the NSF, SSRC, NCEEER, and IREX, was the last recipient of the Soviet Peace Prize (1991), and has been a Senior Fulbright Scholar visiting the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin.  He speaks German and Russian fluently and Polish moderately well, and reads all Slavic languages.