Inaugural Lecture: Professor Carsten Gerner Beuerle

‘How to Quantify Legal Rules’ delivered by Professor Carsten Gerner-Beuerle (Faculty of Laws, UCL)
Chair: Professor Iain MacNeil
About this Inaugural Lecture
In empirical law and finance scholarship, law is typically conceived of as a datapoint like any other. Legal rules are quantified according to a metric and aggregated into indices. However, there is little discussion of what is an appropriate methodology to translate legal rules into variables and construct legal indices that reflect the substance of the law. In this lecture, it will be argued that current methodological approaches, with few exceptions, do not capture one characteristic of legal rules that renders them inherently different from other types of data: their interdependence. Ignoring interdependence introduces measurement error and results, at least in some cases, in inconsistent estimates. Suggestions will be made for a methodology that takes account of interdependencies, using directors’ duties as an example to illustrate how the suggested methodology captures legal differences.
About the Speaker
Carsten joined UCL as a Professor of Commercial Law in 2017. Prior to this, he worked at the London School of Economics, King’s College London and Humboldt University Berlin. Carsten holds degrees in law and economics from Humboldt University Berlin (First and Second Legal State Exam, Ph.D.), the University of Minnesota (LL.M.) and the University of London (M.Sc. in Economics). He has also held visiting positions at various institutions in Europe and the United States, including Trinity College Dublin, the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Heidelberg University, and Duke University. Carsten is admitted to the bar in Germany and the United Kingdom, regularly advises a German law firm on matters of corporate law and corporate insolvency, and has prepared studies for the European Commission and the European Parliament on the reform of corporate governance, financial regulation, and private international law. He is a research member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI).