* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/8416226562432/WN_WLYcdRa6T5Cs1MMdmM0Mug

About the Event: Is there a place for illegal or nonconsensual evidence in security studies research, such as leaked classified documents? What is at stake, and who bears the responsibility, for determining source legitimacy? Although massive unauthorized disclosures by WikiLeaks and its kindred may excite qualitative scholars with policy revelations, and quantitative researchers with big-data suitability, they are fraught with methodological and ethical dilemmas that the discipline has yet to resolve. I argue that the hazards from this research—from national security harms, to eroding human-subjects protections, to scholarly complicity with rogue actors—generally outweigh the benefits, and that exceptions and justifications need to be articulated much more explicitly and forcefully than is customary in existing work. This paper demonstrates that the use of apparently leaked documents has proliferated over the past decade, and appeared in every leading journal, without being explicitly disclosed and defended in research design and citation practices. The paper critiques incomplete and inconsistent guidance from leading political science and international relations journals and associations; considers how other disciplines from journalism to statistics to paleontology address the origins of their sources; and elaborates a set of normative and evidentiary criteria for researchers and readers to assess documentary source legitimacy and utility. Fundamentally, it contends that the scholarly community (researchers, peer reviewers, editors, thesis advisors, professional associations, and institutions) needs to practice deeper reflection on sources’ provenance, greater humility about whether to access leaked materials and what inferences to draw from them, and more transparency in citation and research strategies.

View Written Draft Paper

About the Speaker: Christopher Darnton is a CISAC affiliate and an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He previously taught at Reed College and the Catholic University of America, and holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. He is the author of Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America (Johns Hopkins, 2014) and of journal articles on US foreign policy, Latin American security, and qualitative research methods. His International Security article, “Archives and Inference: Documentary Evidence in Case Study Research and the Debate over U.S. Entry into World War II,” won the 2019 APSA International History and Politics Section Outstanding Article Award. He is writing a book on the history of US security cooperation in Latin America, based on declassified military documents.

About the event: Join us for a special seminar featuring Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp, author of the bestseller Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. In this new book, Kemp conducts a historical autopsy of hundreds of polities over the last 300,000 years to draw lessons from history on how collapse could unfold in the future and what we can do to avoid it. Drawing on cutting-edge research in anthropology and archaeology, Goliath’s Curse is a radical retelling of human history with many surprising lessons, including the role of inequality in past collapses, how these historical breakdowns often were blessings and not just reversions to a ‘dark age’, and why collapse in the future is a far grimmer prospect.

Dr. Stephen Luby, a physician, researcher, and educator whose global health work has spanned five years in Pakistan and eight years in Bangladesh before joining the Stanford faculty. Dr. Luby brings the perspective of a public health expert deeply familiar with the challenges faced by both fragile and resilient societies on the ground.

Dr. Scott Sagan, Co-Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and a leading authority on international security and political science. Dr. Sagan brings a global security and governance lens, informed by his academic and government experience, to the discussion of how great powers succeed or fail in adapting to existential threats.

Together, Drs. Kemp, Luby, and Sagan will engage in a wide-ranging discussion on what history can teach us about the risks and possibilities of collapse today, from the threats of pandemic and climate crisis to the resiliency of democratic institutions and the fragility of hierarchical power structures. The event will conclude with a moderated audience Q&A.

About the speakers: Luke Kemp researches the end of the world. He is the author of the bestselling book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge. He has advised and led foresight studies for multiple international organisations, including the WHO and Convention on Biological Diversity. Luke’s work has been covered by the BBC, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Prof. Stephen Luby studied philosophy and earned a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude from Creighton University. He then earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Rochester-Strong Memorial Hospital. He studied epidemiology and preventive medicine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Continue reading here.

Scott D. Sagan is Co-Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, and the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He also serves as Co-Chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. Continue reading here.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: The most important thing to say about nuclear weapons is that they have not been used in war since August 1945. This book examines the history of those weapons from the discovery of fission in December 1938 to Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech to the United Nations in December 1988.  It adopts an international and transnational perspective in looking at the nuclear arms race, nuclear crises, peace movements, military strategies, arms control treaties, and the creation of international organizations, since these all involve interactions – some hostile, some cooperative – among states.  These interactions need to be understood, as far as possible, from multiple angles if we are to understand the nuclear order that emerged during the Cold War. The world order is changing, and the nuclear order with it, in important ways.  Does this history suggest lessons for today?

About the speaker: David Holloway is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, Professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute of International Studies, Emeritus.  He joined the Stanford Faculty in 1986.  Before that he taught at Lancaster University and the University of Edinburgh.  He obtained his undergraduate degree in Modern Languages and Literature and his PhD in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University.  At Stanford he has served as co-director of CISAC, director of FSI, and Associate Dean in the School of Humanities and Sciences.  

All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

Skyline Scholars Series

Tuesday, April 14, 2026 | 12:00 pm -1:30 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Measuring Judicial Biases with Artificial Intelligence: Evidence from Chinese IP Litigations

How does judicial fairness in intellectual property (IP) litigations shape the incentives to innovate? This talk examines local bias in IP litigation and its consequences for firm-level innovation in China.

Using a dataset from China Judgements Online on Chinese IP court decisions from 2014–2020, a striking puzzle emerges: despite widespread concerns about local protectionism, non-local plaintiffs frequently win at higher rates than local ones. Two competing forces explain this — a "local protectionism effect," whereby local fiscal incentives bias courts toward local firms, and a "picket fence effect," whereby litigants anticipate bias and self-select out of bringing cases, quietly distorting the pool of disputes that reach the courtroom.

To cut through this identification challenge, researchers train an LLM–based "AI court'' on cases in which both plaintiff and defendant are non-local for which the incentives of local courts to bias either side are absent, generating counterfactual fair win-rates for all other disputes. Comparing observed and predicted win-rates reveals significant judicial bias. A 2019 reform centralizing appellate jurisdiction over a subset of IP cases, namely the technical cases, directly to the National Supreme Court shows that stronger central supervision substantially improves judicial accuracy and curtails bias — and measurably increases firm innovation.

The findings underscore that impartial courts are not just a procedural ideal, but a concrete driver of economic dynamism.

About the Speaker 
 

Professor Hanming Fang is an applied microeconomist with broad theoretical and empirical interests focusing on public economics. He is the Norman C. Grosman Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania and a Skyline Scholar (April 2026) at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. His research integrates rigorous modeling with careful data analysis and has focused on the economic analysis of discrimination; insurance markets, particularly life insurance and health insurance; and health care, including Medicare. In his research on discrimination, Professor Fang has designed and implemented tests to examine the role of prejudice in racial disparities in matters involving search rates during highway stops, treatments received in emergency departments, and racial differences in parole releases. In 2008, Professor Fang was awarded the 17th Kenneth Arrow Prize by the International Health Economics Association (iHEA) for his research on the sources of advantageous selection in the Medigap insurance market.

Professor Fang is currently working on issues related to insurance markets, particularly the interaction between the health insurance reform and the labor market. He has served as co-editor for the Journal of Public Economics and International Economic Review, and associate editor in numerous journals, including the American Economic Review.

Professor Fang received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Before joining the Penn faculty, he held positions at Yale University and Duke University.  He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he served as the acting director of the Chinese Economy Working Group from 2014 to 2016. He is also a research associate of the Population Studies Center and Population Aging Research Center, and a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

About the event: The Russian war in Ukraine is not merely a regional conflict. It is a systemic threat to European democratic resilience. This talk outlines the strategic lessons from Estonia’s recalibration in cybersecurity, energy, defense and diplomacy derived from Ukraine’s recent wartime experience. Examining how Estonia operates as a “digital front line” offers a scalable blueprint for hardening national infrastructure against hybrid threats beyond Northern Europe also pertinent for the US.

About the speaker: Merle Maigre is the Programme Director of Cybersecurity at Estonia’s e-Governance Academy. In 2023-2025, she also served as a chosen Member of the Advisory Group of European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA). Previously, she was Executive Vice President for Government Relations at CybExer Technologies, an Estonian company that provides cyber range based training. In 2017- 2018 Merle Maigre served as the Director of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence (CCDCOE) in Tallinn and in 2018-2022 as the International Advisory Board member of NATO CCDCOE. 2012-2017 she worked as the Security Policy Adviser to Estonian Presidents Kersti Kaljulaid and Toomas Hendrik Ilves.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

Mordecai Kurz is the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics Emeritus at Stanford University. He has worked in diverse fields of Economics. He is the author of Private Power and Democracy's Decline, which follows an earlier book, published in 2023, titled The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age. Together, they offer a unified view of the combined impact of policy, technology, and culture on income and political inequality, and on the functioning and dysfunction of democratic institutions.

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. 

Dr. Matthew Levitt is the Fromer-Wexler Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy where he directs the Institute's Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. Previously, Levitt served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and before that as an FBI counterterrorism analyst, including work on the Millennial and September 11th plots. He also served as a State Department counterterrorism advisor to Gen James L. Jones, the special envoy for Middle East regional security.

Levitt teaches at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the Center for Jewish Civilization, as well as at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.  He previously taught at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.  He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and sits on the advisory boards of several think tanks around the world.  Widely published, Levitt is the author of Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God (Georgetown, 2013 & 2024) and Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (Yale, 2006). Levitt hosts the podcast Breaking Hezbollah’s Golden Rule and created open access, interactive maps of Lebanese Hezbollah worldwide activities and Iranian external operations.