Holger Spamann

Holger Spamann

S.J.D. 2009

Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School

 

hspamann at law.harvard.edu

Dissertation

A Re-Evaluation of the Legal Origins Evidence

Influential quantitative cross-country studies find a correlation between the “legal origin” of a country's legal system (i.e., Common Law, and French, German, and Scandinavian Civil Law) and specific legal rules, and between such rules and various measures of financial and economic development. Chapter 1 and chapter 2 of my dissertation show that key results of this literature in the area of corporate governance and civil procedure, respectively, were artifacts of measurement error. As regards the actual substantive differences between legal families, chapter 3 argues that they are more likely the result of ongoing separate diffusion processes rather than of intrinsic differences between common and civil law.

Fields of Research and Supervisors

  • Comparative Corporate Governance, with Professor Mark J. Roe, Harvard Law School, Overall Faculty Supervisor
  • Corporate Law Theory, with Professor Lucian A. Bebchuk, Harvard Law School
  • Law & Economics, with Professor Louis Kaplow, Harvard Law School

Additional Research Interests

  • Private International Law
  • WTO Law

Education

  • Harvard University GSAS, A.M. (Econ.) 2009, Ph.D. Candidate (Econ.)
  • Harvard Law School, S.J.D. 2009
  • London School of Economics, London, England, B.Sc. (Econ.) 2006
  • University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, Certificate in English Legal Methods 2005
  • Harvard Law School, LL.M. Program 2000-2001
  • University / Court of Appeals of Hamburg, Germany, First State Exam 1999, Second State Exam 2005
  • University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Paris, France, Maîtrise en Droit Privé 1996

Representative Publications

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