Leopold Specht is Stream Convener at the Harvard IGLP Workshop

In January 2015 in Doha Dr. Specht will lead the research track "Legal Architecture of Monetary Integration" at the workhop of the Institute for Global Law and Policy.

The Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) at Harvard Law School is a collaborative faculty effort to nurture innovative approaches to global policy in the face of a legal and institutional architecture manifestly ill-equipped to address our most urgent global challenges. Held in Doha, Qatar each January, the Workshop is an intensive residential program designed for doctoral and post-doctoral scholars and junior faculty. Sponsored and hosted by the Qatar Foundation, each year the Workshop brings together more than 100 young scholars along with more than 50 senior and junior faculty from around the world for serious research collaboration and debate.

The stream explores the global financial architecture as a mechanism of integration within a hegemonic political and economic system. We will use law to interpret and deconstruct that architecture. The financial system plays a central role in the operation of coercive and often compulsory institutional arrangements. We will explore the potential role for critical legal analyses of law in identifying and helping to construct institutional alternatives. Might an alternative set of legal arrangements for finance help to ground alternative forms of political and economic life? We will use Islamic law – as opposed to Islamic finance – as a site to examine the potential for law to structure alternatives.