Katharina Pistor | October 2020 | Erasmus Univeristy Rotterdam
Prof. Katharina Pistor is Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law and Director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at the Columbia Law School of Columbia University in New York City. She is a leading scholar and writer on corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, and comparative law and legal institutions.
Prof. Pistor is a German-trained lawyer that does not only have her academic roots in continental Europe, but despite her U.S. affiliation continues to be active in Europe as well. Prior to moving to Columbia in 2004 she worked among others at the highly prestigious German Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg) and the globally highly-recognized Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She specializes in Comparative law, Comparative corporate law and governance, Governing financial systems, and Law and development.
She is internationally very well known for her scientific works on law and finance in the context of which she has developed a highly recognized ‘legal theory of finance’, according to which ‘… financial markets are legally constructed and as such occupy an essentially hybrid place between state and market, public and private.’ With her continued research on the relationship and interaction between finance, financial markets and law, she is arguably making a major contribution to understanding the causes of global economic and financial crises, and – more broadly – the role that law can (and must) play in the creation and distribution of wealth.