Anu Bradford

About

Anu Bradford is the Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia Law School. She holds a S.J.D. and LL.M. from Harvard Law School and a Licentiate in Laws and a Master of Laws from the University of Helsinki. Bradford is a leading scholar on the European Union’s regulatory power and is known for coining the term the Brussels Effect to describe the European Union’s outsized influence on global markets. She is the author of The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (2020), which was named one of the best books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs, and her latest book, Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, published in September 2023, was recognized as one of the best books of 2023 by the Financial Times and awarded the 2024 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. Bradford is the Director of the European Legal Studies Center at Columbia Law School, a senior scholar at Columbia Business School’s Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business, and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Before joining Columbia in 2012, she was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School, practiced EU and antitrust law in Brussels, and served as an adviser on economic policy in the Parliament of Finland and as an expert assistant at the European Parliament. She is recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and is a frequent keynote speaker at…

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Law and economics
• Law
• Geography
• Political economy
• International trade
• Economic system

Selected publications

• Digital Empires

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023 · 356 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology examines the ideological origins, societal implications, and the relative global influence of three contrasting regulatory approaches toward the digital economy: the American market-driven regulatory model, the Chinese state-driven regulatory model, and the European rights-driven regulatory model. These three models reflect different theories about the relationship between markets, the state, and individual and collective rights.…

  PublisherDOI

• The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World

  2020 · 182 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  For many observers, the European Union is mired in a deep crisis. Between sluggish growth; political turmoil following a decade of austerity politics; Brexit; and the rise of Asian influence, the EU is seen as a declining power on the world stage. Columbia Law professor Anu Bradford argues the opposite in her important new book The Brussels Effect: the EU remains an influential superpower that shapes the world in its image. By promulgating regulations that shape the international business enviro…

• The False Choice Between Digital Regulation and Innovation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 40 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?

  The Journal of Law and Economics · 2021 · 37 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  There is a large body of research in economics and law suggesting that the legal origin of a country—that is, whether its legal regime is based on English common law or French, German, or Nordic civil law—profoundly impacts a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal origin and legal substance has been disputed in the literature and not fully explored with nuanced legal coding. We revisit this debate while leveraging novel cross-country data sets that provide detailed codi…

  DOI

• The Battle for Technological Supremacy

  2023-09-26 · 5 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 5 shows how the individual vertical battles discussed in Chapter 4 are now evolving into a broader horizontal conflict between the US and China as the two digital powers are fighting for technological supremacy. Over the past few years, the US has taken a number of measures to restrict China’s access to strategic technologies, citing national security concerns. China is responding in kind, imposing extensive export and investment restrictions on US companies. This ongoing rivalr…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Adam Chilton

  35 shared

• Katerina Linos

  University of California, Berkeley

  12 shared

• Omri Ben‐Shahar

  University of Chicago

  6 shared

• Jonathon Zytnick

  4 shared

• Nathaniel Sokol

  New York Law School

  4 shared

• Andreas Dür

  University of Salzburg

  3 shared

• Alexander Weaver

  3 shared

• Eric A. Posner

  3 shared

Education

• B.A., Public Policy

  University of Michigan

  1997

• M.A., Public Policy

  University of Michigan

  1999

• Ph.D., Public Policy

  Harvard University

  2005

Awards & honors

• Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research (…
• World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader (2010)

Similar researchers at Columbia University

• Jeffrey A. Faganh-90
• Charles F. Sabelh-60
• Petros C. Mavroidish-51