It’s almost impossible to sue a foreign government in U.S. courts. The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, the court-created “act of state” doctrine, and other common-law immunities shield foreign officials and governments from most lawsuits. For instance, courts have dismissed claims against China, Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia over allegations of torture, detentions, and election interference. Yet foreign governments have unfettered access to U.S. courts as plaintiffs. And foreign dictatorships—including Russia, China, Turkey, and Venezuela—have leveraged this access to harass political dissidents, critics, and even newspapers in the United States. These doctrines create an asymmetry at the heart of this Article: foreign dictators and their proxies can access our courts as plaintiffs to harass their opponents, but their regimes are, in turn, immune from lawsuits here.

This seminar will expose that asymmetry and argue that U.S. courts and Congress should make it harder for foreign dictators to abuse our legal system. This seminar offers three novel contributions. First, this seminar provides the first systematic assessment of foreign dictatorships in U.S. courts. While much of the literature is siloed by area of substantive law—focusing on contexts like human rights or property expropriations—this seminar treats dictators as a transsubstantive category of litigants, worthy of special analysis. Second, this seminar exposes how foreign dictators are increasingly taking advantage of U.S. courts and comity doctrines, especially as plaintiffs. In a misguided effort to promote harmonious foreign relations, courts have provided foreign dictators an array of protections and privileges, which dicta- tors are eagerly exploiting. Finally, this seminar demonstrates that there is no historical, constitutional, or statutory obligation on U.S. courts to give foreign dictators these legal protections and unfettered access to our courts. Because of that, I offer four concrete proposals to both stymie dictators’ access to U.S. courts as plaintiffs—through a proposed foreign sovereign anti-SLAPP statute—and weaken the protections that dictators enjoy as defendants. Simply stated, U.S. courts should not be instruments of foreign authoritarian oppression.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Diego A. Zambrano’s primary research and teaching interests lie in the areas of civil procedure, transnational litigation, and judicial federalism. His work explores the civil litigation landscape: the institutions, norms, and incentives that influence litigant and judicial behavior. Professor Zambrano also has an interest in comparative constitutional law and legal developments related to Venezuela. He currently leads an innovative Stanford Policy Lab tracking “Global Judicial Reforms” and has served as an advisor to pro-democracy political parties in Venezuela. In 2021, Professor Zambrano received the Barbara Allen Babcock Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Professor Zambrano’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming at the Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and Virginia Law Review, among other journals, and has been honored by the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) and the National Civil Justice Institute. Professor Zambrano will be a co-author of the leading casebook Civil Procedure: A Modern Approach (8th ed. 2024) (with Marcus, Pfander, and Redish). In addition, Professor Zambrano serves as the current chair of the Federal Courts Section of the AALS. He also writes about legal issues for broader public audiences, with his contributions appearing in the Wall Street Journal, BBC News, and Lawfare.

After graduating with honors from Harvard Law School in 2013, Professor Zambrano spent three years as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb in New York, focusing on transnational litigation and arbitration. Before joining Stanford Law School in 2018, Professor Zambrano was a Bigelow Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Research on remedies for affective polarization has primarily focused on psychological interventions, and limited studies consider how state institutions might depolarize voters. I argue that compulsory military service—a central state institution—can depolarize voters because it prevents early partisan sorting and increases the likelihood of contact between partisans during their impressionable years.

Leveraging the staggered abolition of mandatory conscription laws in fifteen European countries and employing a regression discontinuity design, I show that men exempt from mandatory conscription report higher levels of affective polarization than men who were subject to mass conscription. This effect is mainly driven by partisan parochialism among men exempt from service and is unrelated to ideological change. My findings emphasize the potential depolarizing effects of state institutions and illustrate how the abolition of mandatory service contributed to intensified patterns of affective polarization in Europe, contributing to the literature on the institutional origins of affective polarization.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Chagai M. Weiss is a postdoctoral fellow at the Conflict and Polarization Initiative at the King Center on Global Development at Stanford University. After spending two years as a research fellow at Harvard University's Middle East Initiative, Chagai received a Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Chagai's primary interest is in understanding the potential role of institutions in reducing prejudice and conflict in divided societies. Chagai's work has been published or is forthcoming in multiple venues, including Cambridge University Press (Elements in Experimental Political Science), the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, and Comparative Political Studies.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

On April 26, 2023, Israel will mark its 75th birthday as a modern independent state. It is a bittersweet anniversary.

On the one hand, Israelis can (and do) look back at 75 years of remarkable socio-economic, technological, diplomatic, and political development achieved under conditions of extreme adversity. On the other hand, Israel is currently experiencing its worst constitutional crisis and is facing a number of internal and external challenges that threaten to unravel its political order, divide its people, distance it from its closest allies, empower its adversaries, and undermine its national security.

The occasion of this significant anniversary provides a unique opportunity to discuss the past, present, and possible futures of Israeli democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Amichai Magen is a visiting Associate Professor and visiting fellow in Israel Studies at Stanford University. In Israel he serves as the head of the MA Program in Diplomacy & Conflict Studies, and Director of the Program on Democratic Resilience and Development (PDRD) at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, Reichman University, Herzliya. Magen’s research and teaching interests include Democracy, the Rule of Law, Liberal Orders, and Political Violence.

Amichai Magen received the Yitzhak Rabin Fulbright Award (2003), served as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), Stanford University, and was the first Israeli to be awarded the prestigious National Fellow Award at the Hoover Institution (2008). In 2016 he was named Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy, an award that recognizes outstanding thought-leaders around the world. Between 2018 and 2022, he was Principal Investigator in two European Union Horizon 2020 research consortia, EU-LISTCO and RECONNECT.

Amichai Magen is a Board Member of the International Coalition for Democratic Renewal (ICDR), the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR), the Israeli Association for the Study of European Integration (IASEI), and the Institute for Political Studies at the Catholic University of Lisbon, Portugal. He also serves on the Editorial Board of the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs (IJFA), published quarterly by Taylor & Francis.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

SCCEI Spring Seminar Series 

Wednesday, April 12, 2023 | 11:00 am -12:15 pm Pacific Time  
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Labor Market Outcomes, Cognitive Skills, and Noncognitive Skills in Rural China

This paper examines the relationship between childhood cognitive and noncognitive skills and labor market outcomes, using a rich longitudinal data set from rural China to overcome simultaneity concerns.  We find that childhood cognitive skills have strong explanatory power for the wages of adults in their late 20s, even after controlling for years of education.  We also find gender differences in the returns to various noncognitive skills, including internalizing and externalizing behavior. Females are penalized for externalizing behavior while males are rewarded, suggesting the role of gender norms in the labor market.

About the Speaker  
 

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Paul Glewwe is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota. His interests are economics of education, poverty and inequality in developing countries, and applied econometrics. Since receiving his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University, he has worked in the following countries: Cambodia, China, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Laos, Madagascar, Malaysia, Morocco, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, and Viet Nam. His recent publications have appeared in the Handbook of the Economics of Education, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Political Economy and World Bank Economic Review. Glewwe is currently a co-editor for Economic Development and Cultural Change. 

Seminar Series Moderators  
 

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Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University.  For the past 30 years, he has worked on the economics of poverty reduction. Currently, his work on poverty has its full focus on human capital, including issues of rural health, nutrition and education. For the past 20 year, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Most recently, Rozelle's research focuses on the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition in China. In recognition of this work, Dr. Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards. Among them, he became a Yangtse Scholar (Changjiang Xuezhe) in Renmin University of China in 2008. In 2008 he also was awarded the Friendship Award by Premiere Wen Jiabao, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a foreigner.   
 

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Hongbin Li is the Co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, and a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). Hongbin obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 2001 and joined the economics department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he became full professor in 2007. He was also one of the two founding directors of the Institute of Economics and Finance at the CUHK. He taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing 2007-2016 and was C.V. Starr Chair Professor of Economics in the School of Economics and Management. He founded the Chinese College Student Survey (CCSS) in 2009 and the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) in 2014.

Hongbin’s research has been focused on the transition and development of the Chinese economy, and the evidence-based research results have been both widely covered by media outlets and well read by policy makers around the world. He is currently the co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics.

Watch Recording

Questions? Contact Garrett Grothe at gtgrothe@stanford.edu

Co-Sponsored by CISAC and the Stanford Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

The 3rd annual Stanford Existential Risks Conference aims to take stock of global catastrophic and existential risk studies. A special focus of this year's conference will be risk intersections, reinforcements, and cascades: how one risk may amplify (or diminish) another, and how multiple risks interact to create new concerns that may be larger than the sum of their parts. The conference will also feature discussions of the ethics of radical longtermism. 

The conference will take place at Stanford University in a hybrid format. It begins with a welcome dinner on April 20 for in-person participants. All of April 21 will be in-person, with all events broadcast online for remote participants. The morning of April 22 will feature remote presentations and participation, available to the in-person audience as well. For the remainder of April 22, we will close with in-person (and remotely available) events.

Space is limited and registration is required.  For more information visit https://sericonference.stanford.edu/

About SERI

Founded in 2019, the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative is a collaboration between Stanford faculty and students dedicated to mitigating existential risks, such as extreme climate change, nuclear winter, global pandemics (and other risks from synthetic biology), and risks from advanced artificial intelligence. Our goal is to foster engagement from both within and beyond the Stanford community to produce meaningful work aiming to preserve the future of humanity. We aim to provide skill-building, networking, professional pathways, and community for students and faculty interested in pursuing existential risk reduction.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

The third installment in a special event series on the occasion of Shorenstein APARC's 40th Anniversary, "Asia in 2030, APARC@40"

Hosted by APARC's Asia Health Policy Program

The Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) aims to help empower health systems and policymakers in the Asia-Pacific region to improve their proactive, evidence-based responses to population health problems. This webinar brings together former postdoctoral fellows and visiting scholars from the program to explore their contributions to guiding healthcare providers and policy audiences toward a better understanding of health and demographic issues and the delivery of disease management and other health services. In celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, these scholars and practitioners will also share their reflections on how the center and the program have shaped their research and professional careers.

Speakers

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Brian Chen, JD, PhD. Dr. Chen is an associate professor at the Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina. He brings with him a global perspective on health and well-being, having lived and worked in health-related industries in Taiwan, Japan, and France. Using the tools of economic analysis, his research focuses on the organization and delivery of health care as well as the social determinants of health in Asia and the United States. A particular focus of his work is on the impact of laws and economic incentives on healthcare treatment decisions. His doctoral dissertation, published in the Journal of Public Economics, explored how Taiwan’s separating policy that mandated the separation of diagnosing from drug dispending affected physician prescribing behavior, and whether such changes had an impact on observable health outcomes.

Dr. Chen continues to work on economics- and health law-related research, investigating the impact of opioid regulations on prescribing behavior and subsequent health consequences. His new project aims to understand how the introduction of a novel class of therapeutics may have affected the undertreatment of osteoporosis, an important question in aging societies in Asia, the United States, and around the world.

Dr. Chen received his BA summa cum laude in Linguistics with Computer Science from Harvard College (1992), JD from Stanford Law School (1997), and his PhD in Business Administration from the University of California at Berkeley (2009). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford from 2009 to 2011.

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Wasin Laohavinij, MD. Wasin Laohavinij is a medical doctor with an interest in quality improvement and program evaluation. He was a visiting scholar at the Asia Health Policy Program, Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center, Stanford University in the United States in the Autumn of 2019.

Currently, He is a preventive medicine physician concentrating on non-communicable diseases and serves as a Chief of Data Management and Cost Evaluating Center, at King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital, Thailand. His work focuses on reducing healthcare costs while maintaining the quality-of-care patients receive. Furthermore, he is also interested in evaluating the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of health interventions.

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Phyu Phyu Thin Zaw, MBBS, MPP, PhD. Phyu Phyu Thin Zaw, who is a Burmese national, is a medical doctor, epidemiologist, and health systems researcher currently working as a Lecturer in the School of Public Health at the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, University of Hong Kong. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Science in Exile initiative, which brings together at-risk, displaced, and refugee scientists along with like-minded organizations who work together to strengthen systems that support, protect and integrate such affected scientists.

Phyu Phyu’s research interests are equity, health and education policies, Southeast Asia health systems and policies, sexual and reproductive health, gender equality, poverty eradication, and human rights issues. Thin Zaw is also a public health and policy consultant giving technical advice to think tanks and non-governmental organizations.

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Margaret Triyana, PhD. Dr Triyana is a Senior Economist at the World Bank's Office of the Chief Economist, South Asia Region. Her main research area examines human capital formation over the life cycle, with an emphasis on how policies and environmental factors affect different dimensions of human capital in low and middle-income countries. She also examines the distributional impacts of both environmental risks and policies.

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Siyan Yi, MD, MHSc, PhD. Dr. Yi is a medical doctor and an infectious disease epidemiologist by training. He received his PhD from the School of International Health of the University of Tokyo in Japan in 2010. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Health Policy Program, Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center, Stanford University from 2011-2012. He is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Integrated Research Program at Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore. He also serves as Director of KHANA Center for Population Health Research in Cambodia and Adjunct Associate Professor at Touro University California, the United States. His implementation research program focuses on developing and evaluating community-based innovative interventions for improving access to prevention, treatment, and care services for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, sexual and reproductive health, and maternal and child health among vulnerable and marginalized populations in Southeast Asia.