KU Law News
KU Law News
Sept. 16, 2009
Noted scholar on financial markets, globalization joins KU Law as visiting professor
David "Bert" Westbrook
A respected voice on financial market reform and globalization joins the University of Kansas School of Law this year as a visiting professor.
David A. “Bert” Westbrook, professor of law and Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar at the University at Buffalo Law School at the State University of New York, is teaching Contracts this fall and Regulation of the Financial Markets next spring at KU.
His latest book, “Out of Crisis: Rethinking our Financial Markets,” is due out next month from Paradigm Publishers. In the book, Westbrook illuminates the intellectual, business and policy errors that led to the current economic downturn. Through legal and political analysis, he shows how the ideologies of the right and left have distorted financial thinking and policy, and then sketches the emergence of a new understanding of risk management and bureaucratic regulation.
“Professor Westbrook’s fascinating new book is not just an exegesis of the recent financial crisis – it is a compelling and entertaining diatribe against some of the sacred cows of finance, among them the notions that markets are presumed efficient, corporations can self-regulate, sophistication matters, risk management reduces risk, and securities regulation makes markets transparent,” said Frank Partnoy, professor of law and finance at the University of San Diego, best-selling author and one of the world’s leading experts on the complexities of modern finance and financial market regulation. “Westbrook takes all of these ideas out back behind their once-sturdy intellectual shed and pumps them full of lead. He then provides a regulatory roadmap that will be an important part of the debate about the future of market capitalism.”
Westbrook has given talks on globalization, the financial crisis and related topics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the London School of Economics, HEC Paris, NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Belgium, the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg, the UN’s World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, and most leading U.S. universities. He has spoken extensively internationally with sponsorship from the U.S. State Department. Westbrook has also been invited to the inaugural “policy roundtable” of the Bureau of European Policy Advisors, the internal think tank of the European Commission, to discuss European responses to the financial crisis.
Next year, Westbrook will publish “Deploying Ourselves: Islamist Violence, Globalization, and the Responsible Projection of US Force.” The book offers a reconceptualization of America’s national security institutions and strategies to better match today’s realities.
Westbrook is also author of “Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters (University of Chicago Press, 2008); “Between Citizen and State: An Introduction to the Corporation (Paradigm, 2007); and “City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent” (Routledge, 2003).
Westbrook received his law degree in 1992 from Harvard University, where he was a Ford Fellow, and a bachelor’s in 1988 from Emory University, where he was a Woodruff Scholar. Before joining the SUNY-Buffalo faculty, he practiced international corporate law at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale) in Washington, D.C. He served for two years as a law clerk to Judge S. Jay Plager of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.