Terence Halliday
  • Research Professor Emeritus
Joint Appointment
Adjunct Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University
Honorary Professor, Australian National University
Education
M.A. (Hons), Massey University, New Zealand
M.A., University of Toronto
Ph.D., Sociology, University of Chicago

Terence Halliday

  • Research Professor Emeritus
ABF Researcher

Terence Halliday is a Research Professor Emeritus at the American Bar Foundation and an Honorary Professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance (REGNET) at Australian National University, where he is also a Fellow of the College of Asia and the Pacific. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University.

A specialist in the globalization of law, Halliday has two main avenues of research:

  1. Lawyers’ fights for basic legal freedoms in past and present struggles for political liberalism, for which he has co-led international, interdisciplinary networks of country specialists on Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. For the past fifteen years he has focused on China’s criminal defense and rights’ lawyers as well as international efforts to influence China’s adherence to international human rights norms.
  2. The globalization of law and markets with special attention to the interactions among global, national, and local lawmakers. The latter has involved fieldwork within the UN Commission on International Trade Law; the International Monetary Fund (IMF); and international economic governance organizations, such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as in China, Indonesia, South Korea, the U.S., and the U.K. on corporate bankruptcy, secured transactions, carriage of goods by sea, anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism.

Halliday also works extensively on transnational legal orders.

He is the author or coauthor of eleven books and many other scholarly publications.

In addition to his teaching and research, on global regulation, governance, and lawmaking, Halliday has consulted with international public policy bodies including the IMF, OECD, World Bank, United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), and the Government of China. On lawyers and legal rights in China, he has briefed the U.S. State Department, the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Council on Foreign Relations. He testified before the U.S. Congress in June 2017 on China’s assault on law and lawyers. Halliday also contributes to public debate on law and rights, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, Le Monde, and Al Jazeera.

His commentary on the fight for basic legal freedoms, an open civil society and moderate state in China can be followed on Twitter @HallidayTerry.

Research Focus

The globalization of law with a twofold focus: On markets, especially ways that international organizations (e.g., the UN Commission on International Trade Law, the World Bank and IMF) create global rules for the world in such diverse areas as corporate bankruptcy, transport of goods across oceans, secured credit transactions and international crime; and on politics, with  struggles by legal complexes for political liberalism worldwide, currently focused on the ability of China’s criminal defense and rights lawyers to protect basic legal freedoms.