Bankruptcy and the Entrepreneurial Ethos in Antebellum American Law

As Duke’s Senior Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Programs & Initiatives, I lead the university’s multifaceted efforts to foster collaborative, boundary-crossing research, education, and engagement. Duke has created a robust set of cross-school institutes and centers, as well as a slew of signature interdisciplinary programs that connect scholars across the divisions of knowledge and foster applied experiential learning. Leading examples include Multiyear Interdisciplinary Hubs, Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Collaboratives (IGECs), DukeEngage (a summer program that provides undergraduates with an immersive community engagement project) and Bass Connections (year-long and summer applied interdisciplinary research teams, and semester-long collaborative project courses that annual involve more than 200 faculty members and over 2500 students at all levels). In recent years, I have written widely on the value of experiential learning and collaborative inquiry (e.g. Collaborative, Project-Based Learning in Higher Education: Case Studies), and engaged with numerous universities about their interdisciplinary strategy. 

As a historian, my scholarship has an interdisciplinary cast, probing the historical intersections among law, business, politics, and policy in the modern United States. One key strand of my work explores evolving fault lines within American capitalism, like bankruptcy and business fraud. A second line of research examines the origins, evolution, and impacts of the modern regulatory state. I have pursued a number of collaborative projects with historians and other social scientists who study regulatory governance in industrialized and industrializing societies.

My most recent book is Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff (Princeton University Press, 2017). Economic duplicity has bedeviled American markets from the founding of the Republic. In this wide-ranging history, I emphasize the enduring connections between capitalist innovation and business fraud, as well as the vexed efforts by private organizations and state agencies to curb the worst economic deceptions. Placing recent fraud scandals in long-term context, I argue that we rely solely on a policy of caveat emptor at our peril; and that a mixture of public education, sensible disclosure rules, and targeted enforcement campaigns best contain the problem of business fraud. Fraud received the 2018 Ralph Gomory Prize from the Business History Conference. You can find extensive supplemental resources related to the history of American business fraud here.

A growing proportion of my writing engages interdisciplinary debates about the nature of regulatory policy more generally, as well as the evolution of dominant approaches to political economy in modern capitalist societies. This dimension of my scholarship led to the publication of Government and Markets: Toward a New Theory of Regulation (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which I edited along with the historian David Moss. This volume brings together several new conceptual approaches to regulatory governance from across the social sciences. It also lays out a wide-ranging research agenda for regulatory studies.  

In 2015, my sole-edited three-volume multidisciplinary research collection, Business Regulation, came out with Edward Elgar.  This collection includes a long introductory essay, “The Dialectics of Modern Regulatory Governance,” that conceptualizes the emergence of the modern regulatory state in the nineteenth-century and its evolution since then, often in response to powerful critiques from scholars and regulated businesses.  It then provides over 100 leading writings on key aspects of regulatory governance, with selections that range from 1869 to the 2010s, and from across the social sciences.

Along with collaborators Jonathan Wiener, Lori Bennear, and Kim Krawiec, I have co-edited another interdisciplinary volume that examines when and how industrialized democracies reconfigure regulatory institutions in the aftermath of major crises. This book, Policy Shock: Recalibrating Risk and Regulation after Oil Spills, Nuclear Accidents, and Financial Crises, came out with Cambridge University Press in 2017.

Through Bass Connections, I co-led a multiyear research team that examined the origins of the 2008 global financial crisis, focusing on the dynamics of sub-national residential mortgage market regulation in the US.  This team built an extensive archive of oral histories with legislators, regulators, judges, community leaders, consumer lawyers, NGO heads, financial sector executives, and providers of financial services.

[last updated, 7/25]