Katharina Pistor - Curriculum Vitae#

Academic Positions

Katharina Pistor is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School and serves as the Director of the Law School’s Center on Global Legal Transformation. Prior to taking up her position at Columbia University, she held academic positions at the Kennedy School of Government (Harvard University) and the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Law in Hamburg. She has been visiting professor at several universities in the U.S. (Harvard, NYU, UPenn), Germany (Goethe University, Frankfurt), the United Kingdom (Oxford and LSE), Israel (Tel Aviv University and Herzliya) and the Netherlands (Amsterdam).

Education

She obtained her law degree from Freiburg University in 1988, a Masters in Law from the University of London specializing in Soviet Law (at UCL) and Chinese Law (at SOAS) in 1989, obtained her qualification to practice law in 1992 (2nd State Examination), a Master in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government (Harvard University in 1994), and a Doctorate in Law from the University of Munich in 1998.

Teaching

Pistor teaches (US) corporate law, law and development, law and finance in theory and practice and has taught and co-taught courses at Columbia Law School and elsewhere on privatization in Eastern Europe, comparative law, European corporate law, and financial governance. Pistor has supervised about a dozen doctoral students and frequently serves as external reviewer on dissertation committees in Europe (recent examples include Durham, Amsterdam, Leiden and the EUI).

Research

Pistor’s research and numerous publications span corporate law, corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, and comparative law and legal institutions. Her most recent monograph is “The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality” (Princeton, 2019), which has been translated into 8 languages. Other works that have found wide recognition in the literature include “A Legal Theory of Finance (Journal of Comparative Economics, 2013), “Law and Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic Development Around the World” (Chicago University Press, 2008), and “Economic Development, and the Transplant Effect” with Dan Berkowitz and Francois Richard (European Economic Review, 2003).