27 February 2025. “… and to contribute to the development of international order”: Corporate Philanthropy and the Making of Transnational Law.” Alexandra Kemmerer.
Thursday 27 February 2025
2 - 3 pm
In person
“… and to contribute to the development of international order”: Corporate Philanthropy and the Making of Transnational Law.”
In retrospect, the political economy of international legal knowledge production in the 20th century appears as a dense field of multiple, often reciprocal connections and overlaps between corporations and universities, the financial industry and research institutions, legal practitioners and academics, bureaucrats and diplomats. In this beehive seminar, I will discuss the significance of corporate philanthropy for transnational legal developments after 1945. How have corporate agenda-setting, logics, and a particular ‘corporate habitus’ influenced and shaped the work and research design of legal academics and academic institutions at the receiving end of corporate funding? In my presentation, I will focus on the contribution of the Ford Foundation's International Legal Studies program to the development of the law of European integration since the 1950s. To contextualize and draw out its specificities, I will compare Ford’s philanthropy to previously established European forms of law-related research funding at the interface of state, economy and scholarship.
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