About

Kevin E. Davis is the Beller Family Professor of Business Law at New York University School of Law. His research and teaching focus on the relationship between law and economic development, with particular emphasis on anti-corruption law, commercial law, and the measurement of the performance of legal systems. He has published over 50 articles or essays, four edited volumes, and a monograph titled 'Between Impunity and Imperialism: The Regulation of Transnational Bribery' (Oxford University Press, 2019). Davis has held visiting appointments at institutions including Cambridge University’s Clare Hall, Fundação Getulio Vargas School of Law in São Paulo, the University of Southern California, the University of Toronto, and the University of the West Indies in Barbados, and has lectured widely around the world. He joined NYU Law faculty in 2004 and served as Vice Dean for Global Affairs from 2012 to 2017. Prior to NYU, he was a tenured faculty member at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, worked as an associate at Torys LLP in Toronto, and served as a law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada to Mr. Justice John Sopinka. He holds a B.A. from McGill University, an LL.B. from the University of Toronto, and an LL.M. from Columbia University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Law and economics
• Law
• Finance
• Business
• Economics
• Geography

Selected publications

• Legal Heterodoxy in the Global South: Priority of Workers versus Secured Creditors in Insolvency

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Contract Law and Inequality in the Global South

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-06-19

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Does contract law have any role to play in tackling economic inequality, one of the most pressing problems of our time? The orthodox answer to this question is no: contract law should promote autonomy, efficiency, and/or justice in exchange, while distributive objectives should be dealt with exclusively through the fiscal system. Critics of this orthodoxy struggle with the prevailing understanding that contract law around the world has converged on doctrines that are insensitive to distributive considerations. This chapter contributes to this debate by showing how courts in South Africa, Brazil and Colombia prominent Global South countries from different legal traditions – have recently diverged from orthodoxy to embrace the task of using contract law to address inequality. The emergence of contract law heterodoxy in Global South countries draws attention to the existing, if more limited, instances of heterodoxy in the contract laws of the United States and Europe and to the stakes of contract law more generally. This analysis highlights how mounting inequality may increase the appeal of contract law heterodoxy and suggests that the present reign of contract law orthodoxy is neither universal nor inevitable.

  PublisherDOI

• Legal Heterodoxy in the Global South

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-06-19 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How do private law institutions of developing countries differ from those of developed countries? A common view is that the legal systems of the Global South are often outdated, failed transplants of Global North models, or plagued by enforcement challenges. This book project offers a different perspective by focusing on legal innovation and adaptation in the Global South. We examine how countries in the Global South have embraced legal doctrines and solutions that deviate from approaches that currently hold the status of orthodoxy in richer countries, and pursue distinct and potentially broader public policy objectives or reflect different values, in response to conditions that are commonplace in developing countries. Our analysis points to reasons why the legacy of colonialism, limited fiscal capacity, economic dependence on richer countries, and macro-economic volatility may encourage lawmakers in poor countries to develop heterodox doctrines. We explore different manifestations of legal heterodoxy across various areas of private law in a range of countries in the Global South. Recognizing legal heterodoxies in the Global South enlarges our understanding of legal experiences and possibilities, and contributes to our understanding about the driving forces and direction of legal evolution around the world.

  PublisherDOI

• Legal Heterodoxy in the Global South: Priority of Workers versus Secured Creditors in Insolvency

  The American Journal of Comparative Law · 2025-10-14 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We examine how priority of workers’ claims vis-à-vis secured claims in insolvency varies across jurisdictions and over time as a window into the shifting treatment of distributional or social justice considerations in private law. Existing literature focuses on the extent to which laws in the Global South are either legal transplants from European countries belonging to the same legal family or have more recently adhered to “neoliberal” prescriptions from the United States or international organizations. Our findings highlight the limits of these theories by showing (i) Global South-driven legal innovation and diffusion, with Mexico’s 1917 constitution granting workers’ claims priority over secured claims nearly two decades before comparable French legislation was enacted, and (ii) significant persistence—and, in some cases, growing recognition—of priority for workers’ claims across jurisdictions, despite strong contrary pressures from international organizations such as the World Bank and UNCITRAL. We also discuss the role of state capacity in explaining legal heterodoxy in the Global South and describe the growth of sub rosa legal reforms that circumvent workers’ priority in bankruptcy through new categories of insolvency-proof security interests.

  PublisherDOI

• What Did International Anticorruption Institutions Learn From Operation Car Wash?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Significance of Foreign Law: A Jamaican Case Study

  Law & Social Inquiry · 2025-05-02

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Analyses of the relationships between law and society often focus exclusively on domestic laws, meaning laws that emanate from domestic sources. This approach is not necessarily appropriate in contexts that involve significant cross-border flows of ideas, information, goods, services, people, or legal authority. In these cases, there are both practical and intellectual reasons to define the set of laws to be analyzed as including all of the laws, both domestic and foreign, that affect a particular aspect of a given society. In other words, the analysis ought to focus upon sets of laws that are defined in terms of their subjects rather than their sources. A case study from Jamaica illustrates this point. The legal determinants of Jamaica’s relatively high homicide rate include many foreign laws and associated enforcement practices—most notably, US laws and practices concerning trafficking in firearms and narcotics, deportation, extradition, and cross-border fraud. Consequently, it will be difficult to understand the relationship between law and society in Jamaica without taking into account all of the laws that affect Jamaicans as opposed to just the laws adopted by Jamaican legal institutions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Corruption and controlling shareholders

  Theoretical Inquiries in Law · 2024-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Controlling shareholders have been directly involved in some of the largest and most consequential bribery scandals in the world over the course of the last decade. Nevertheless, the academic literature and the dominant international model of anticorruption law have neglected the dynamics and implications of controlling shareholder involvement in the payment of bribes. We argue that controlling shareholders, especially in family-controlled firms, may be uniquely positioned to lead corrupt schemes. We then analyze the incidence of this phenomenon in recent U.S. enforcement actions under the FCPA and in Brazilian enforcement actions under the Car Wash (Lava Jato) anticorruption operation. Controlled companies account for a minority of the FCPA cases, but for a large majority of the Brazilian cases. Controlling shareholders were implicated in a significant portion of actions against controlled companies in both contexts. We argue that the dominant international model, which is premised on organizational liability and incentives for compliance programs, is ill-suited to addressing cases of bribery led by controlling shareholders, and call for a distinct array of legal responses.

  PublisherDOI

• Filling the Void: How E.U. Privacy Law Spills Over to the U.S.

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Filling the Void: How E.U. Privacy Law Spills Over to the U.S.

  Journal of law & empirical analysis. · 2024-05-16 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  There is mounting evidence that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has influenced the information privacy policies and practices that firms adopt in relation to people outside of the E.U., even when that is not required by the E.U. regulation. We use a hand-coded dataset of privacy policies from firms’ U.S. and E.U.-facing websites to document and explain these kinds of international regulatory spillovers. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that spillovers are driven by the costs of complying with different standards in different parts of the same firm. In fact, 75% of the firms in our sample use the same privacy policy for their U.S. and E.U.-facing websites. At the same time, our findings do not support the conclusion that firms comply with the GDPR in their U.S.-facing privacy policies out of fear of being sanctioned if the policy is somehow applied to E.U. residents. Finally, we find that spillovers are more prevalent among firms with a physical presence in the E.U. This suggests that international networks of compliance professionals may play a significant and understudied role in regulatory compliance, perhaps by providing channels for norms and resources to move across borders.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Did the Global South Have Their Say on EU Supply Chain Regulation?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mariana Pargendler

  17 shared

• Benedict Kingsbury

  15 shared

• Michael J. Trebilcock

  12 shared

• Sally Engle Merry

  10 shared

• Jason Watkins

  KBR (United States)

  9 shared

• Stephen J. Choi

  New York Law School

  9 shared

• Florencia Marotta‐Wurgler

  New York University

  9 shared

• Guillermo Jorge

  5 shared

Education

• B.A.

  McGill University

• Other

  University of Toronto

• Other

  Columbia University

Awards & honors

• Distinguished Article Prize (with Oren Bar-Gill), American L…