Mark Lemley is the William H. Neukom Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, and the Director of Stanford's LLM Program in Law, Science and Technology. He teaches intellectual property, computer and Internet law, patent law, and antitrust. He is the author of seven books (most in multiple editions) and 111 articles on these and related subjects, including the two-volume treatise IP and Antitrust. His works have been reprinted throughout the world, and translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Italian. He has taught intellectual property law to federal and state judges at numerous Federal Judicial Center and ABA programs, has testified seven times before Congress and numerous times before the California legislature, the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Modernization Commission on patent, trade secret, antitrust and constitutional law matters, and has filed numerous amicus briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court, the California Supreme Court, and the federal circuit courts of appeals. He has been named California Lawyer's Attorney of the Year (2005), Best Lawyers' San Francisco IP Lawyer of the Year (2010), and a Young Global Leader by the Davos World Economic Forum (2007). In 2009 he received the California State Bar's inaugural IP Vanguard award. In 2002 he was chosen Boalt's Young Alumnus of the Year. He has been recognized as one of the top 50 litigators in the country under 45 by the American Lawyer (2007), one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the nation by the National Law Journal (2006), one of the 10 most admired attorneys in IP, one of the top intellectual property lawyers in California (2003, 2007, 2009, 2010) and one of the 100 most influential lawyers in California (2004, 2005, 2006, and 2008) by the Daily Journal, among other honors.

Mark is a founding partner of Durie Tangri LLP. He litigates and counsels clients in all areas of intellectual property, antitrust, and Internet law. He has argued six Federal appellate cases and numerous district court cases, and represented clients including Comcast, Genentech, Google, Grokster, Hummer Winblad, Impax, Intel, NetFlix, Palm, TiVo, and the University of Colorado Foundation in 75 cases in nearly two decades as as lawyer.

After graduating from law school, Mark clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and has practiced law in Silicon Valley with Brown & Bain and with Fish & Richardson and in San Francisco with Keker & Van Nest. Until January 2000, he was the Marrs McLean Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law, and until June 2004 he was the Elizabeth Josslyn Boalt Professor of Law at the Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berkeley.

Professor Lee will examine why South Korean labor unions have engaged in militant activism since the country's transition to democracy in 1987.  This situation contrasts with Taiwan, to which Korea's economic and political development is otherwise very similar.   Professor Lee will argue that the militant unionism reflects the weakness of Korea's democratic institutions, particularly its political parties.

Professor Lee received her doctoral degree in political science from Duke University and has been teaching at the State University of New York at Binghamton since 2006.  Her research has appeared in Studies in Comparative International Studies, Critical Asian Studies, Asian Survey, Korean Observer, and Asia-Pacific Forum.  Her book, tentatively entitled Democratic Politics and Labor Activism in East Asia, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2011.

Steve Radelet is Senior Advisor for Development in the Office of the Secretary of State. From 2002 to 2010 he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, where his work focused on economic growth, poverty reduction, foreign aid, debt, and trade. He served as an economic advisor to the Government of Liberia from 2005-2009, and was founding co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia from 2000 to 2002. From 1990 to 2000, he was on the faculty of Harvard University, where he was a fellow at the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) and a lecturer on economics and public policy.  He is the author of Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries are Leading the Way and Challenging Foreign Aid: A Policymaker's Guide to the Millennium Challenge Account, and co-author of Economics of Development, a leading undergraduate textbook. He served as resident advisor to the Ministry of Finance in Indonesia (1991-95) and The Gambia (1986-88), and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Western Samoa.

Brian Levy currently is Head of the Bank's Governance and Anti-Corruption Secretariat in the World Bank - from where co-ordinates implementation of the Bank Group's GAC strategy. He is the author of Governance Reform: Bridging Monitoring and Action (World Bank, 2007), which builds on his 2006 work on governance monitoring featured in the 2006 Global Monitoring Report, Mutual Accountability: Aid, Trade and Governance . He worked in the World Bank's Africa Vice Presidency from 1991 to 2003 on the challenges of strengthening the institutional underpinnings of African development, for the last four years as sector manager of the Africa Public Sector Reform and Capacity Building Unit. He was a member of the core team which produced the World Bank's 1997 World Development Report, The State in a Changing World.  He has published numerous books and articles on the interactions between public institutions, the private sector and development in Africa, East Asia, and elsewhere, most recently editing (jointly with Sahr Kpundeh) the volume, Building State Capacity in Africa (World Bank Institute, 2004) Prior to joining the Bank he was assistant professor in development economics at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He completed his Ph.D in economics at Harvard University in 1983.

The Muslims of South Asia made the transition to modern economic life more slowly than the region’s Hindus. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were relatively less likely to use large-scale and long-living economic organizations, and less likely to serve on corporate boards. Providing evidence, this paper also explores the institutional roots of the difference in communal trajectories. Whereas Hindu inheritance practices favored capital accumulation within families and the preservation of family fortunes across generations, the Islamic inheritance system, which the British helped to enforce, tended to fragment family wealth. The family trusts (waqfs) that Muslims used to preserve assets across generations hindered capital pooling among families, and they were ill-suited to profit-seeking business. Whereas Hindus generally pooled capital within durable joint family enterprises, Muslims tended to use ephemeral Islamic partnerships. Hindu family businesses facilitated the transition to modern corporate life by imparting skills useful in large and durable organizations.

Timur Kuran is Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. His research focuses on social change, including the evolution of preferences and institutions. He has just completed a book, The Long Divergence (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2010), on the role that Islam played in the economic rise of the Middle East and, subsequently, in the institutional stagnation that accompanied the region's slip into a state of underdevelopment. Some of the archival work on which this book was based will be published, also in 2010, as a ten-volume bi-lingual set entitled Kadı Sicilleri. Among Kuran's earlier publications are Private Truths,(Harvard University Press, Işığında 17. Yüzyıl İstanbul'unda Ekonomik Yaşam / Economic Life in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul, as Reflected in Court Registers Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification 1995) and Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism (Princeton University Press, 2004), each translated into several languages, including Turkish.

Link to paper:  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1656038

Born in New York in 1977, Nir Rosen has been reporting from Iraq since April of 2003 and has spent most of the last seven and a half years in Iraq. He recently returned from a trip to seven provinces in the country. He has also reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Mexico, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Turkey and Egypt. He has written for magazines such as The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and most major American publications. He has filmed documentaries. He is a Fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security. His new book, Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World, is about occupation, resistance, sectarianism and civil war from Iraq to Lebanon to Afghanistan.

Philip Keefer is a Lead Research Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. Since receiving his PhD in Economics from Washington University at St. Louis, he has worked continuously on the interaction of institutions, political economy and economic development. His research has included investigations of the impact of insecure property rights on economic growth; the effect of political credibility on the policy choices of governments; and the sources of political credibility in democracies and autocracies. It has appeared in journals that span economics and political science, ranging from the Quarterly Journal of Economics to the American Review of Political Science, and has been influenced by his work in a wide range of countries, including Bangladesh, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, México, Perú, Pakistan and the Philippines.