HLS professor David W. Kennedy discusses global governance in Renmin law School

• Author: Liu Yang
• Position: School of Law, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA; Assistant Professor, School of Law; Fellow, Law and Technology Institute, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China. Contact: liuyangprc@ruc.edu.cn
• Pages: 107-108

FRONTIERS OF LAW IN CHINA

VOL. 15 MARCH 2020 NO. 1

DOI 10.3868/s050-009-020-0007-3

ACADEMIC NEWS

HLS PROFESSOR DAVI D W. KENNEDY DISCUSSES GLOBAL GOVERNANCE IN

RENMIN LAW SCHOOL

David W. Kennedy, a leading expert of international law at Harvard Law School

(HLS), visited Renmin University of China from January 15 to 17, 2020 to discuss the

role of law in global governance. He is Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law and Director

of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. As the founding and

leading figure of a critical school in international law in the United States, through his

scholarship and his supervision of graduate students, Professor Kennedy calls for

strengthening scholars from developing countries to criticize the Euro-centric

international legal order. He is also a leading U.S. theorist criticizing the human rights

movement and the liberal economic order.

From January 15 to 17, Professor Kennedy delivered the inaugural Global Law and

Strategy Annual Lecture titled “Law in Global Political Economy,” a talk on the

intellectual history of international law, and a keynote speech in a symposium on struggle

and law in global governance. The event has drawn attention across disciplines and

beyond academia. Over 200 audiences across the country and the globe attended the

lecture and symposium.

On January 15, in a conversational style, Professor Kennedy discussed how the

United States positions itself in the 21st century as a designer of the global governance

scheme and its implication on the intellectual history of international law, and relatedly,

how it carries him to the current project of his book titled A World of Struggle: How

Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy. On January 16, in his lecture

titled “Law in Global Political Economy,” Professor Kennedy called international lawyers

to pay attention to the question of distribution in global affairs and to think international

law’s lack of response to the inequality but also as part of this problem. CUI Zhiyuan, a

political economist from Tsinghua University, and international law experts CAI Congyan

from Xiamen University, LIAO Fan and SUN Shiyan from Chinese Academy of Social

Sciences, and ZHU Wenqi from Renmin Law School offered thoughtful comments,

reflecting their understanding of international law and its relationship to the invisible

politics in law.

On January 17, in a full-day symposium dedicated to his book A World of Struggle:

How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy, Professor Kennedy

joined the discussion of 23 scholars on the theoretical account on struggles in law, the