About

Larry Catá Backer is the W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law and International Affairs at Pennsylvania State University. He has been a faculty member in the Law department since 2001 and in the School of International Affairs since 2010. His professional contact information is based at Pennsylvania State University, located in University Park, PA. Professor Backer maintains a personal website and several online platforms where he publishes essays and commentary, including his blog "Law at the End of the Day" and a Chinese language blog titled "白 轲 ：法 学 之彼岸." He is also the Book Series Editor for Globalization Law and Policy at Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group). His academic profile is accessible through SSRN and ORCID, reflecting his active engagement in scholarly communication and research dissemination.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Law
• Sociology
• Chemistry
• Political economy
• Physics
• Accounting
• Quantum mechanics
• Management
• Algorithm
• Public administration
• Economics
• Finance
• Business

Selected publications

• Legal-Institutional Foundations for Reconstruction in a Post-Revolutionary Cuba: A Conceptual Exercise

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Undesirable Clients; Undesirable Lawyers -The Emerging Structures of Gatekeeping Strategies in the U.S.A

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Overcoming the human, rights, and the state in human rights

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-06-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• ANALYSIS OF THE EUROPEAN EXPERIENCE OF THE STRATEGY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOOL EDUCATION IN THE CONTEXT OF DIGITALISATION

  Public Administration and Civil Service · 2025-09-30

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In the context of digitalisation, without socio-economic transformations and increased competition in human capital, effective strategic planning of school education becomes the basis for developing new national systems. This study is devoted to a comparative analysis of the strategy of school education planning in the leading European countries such as Finland, Great Britain, Germany, Italy and Lithuania, for the formation of indicators in Qazaqstan based on the experience of these countries, taking into account the national characteristics of the state. As an analysis of the territory derived from a European state, high results are achieved in international studies of the quality of education, such as PISA, OECD Education at a Glance, and characteristic policies in decentralisation and digitalisation. The purpose of the study is to identify effective strategies and models of international planning, as well as to develop practical recommendations for ensuring effective educational policy in Qazaqstan. The article analyses the main directions of various countries’ educational strategies and regulatory documents. As a result, the author systematises the similarities and develops strategies for school education planning approaches in different European countries and Qazaqstan. The conclusion highlights the need to strengthen decentralisation, develop flexible educational trajectories, enhance the external environment’s transparency and adaptability, and increase business participation in the planning process through education in Qazaqstan, taking into account both best world practices and national characteristics. Unlike previous studies, this paper is the first to conduct a comprehensive comparison of the strategies of five leading European countries, taking into account digitalization and applies the results to the context of Kazakhstan. Keywords: public administration, education, decentralisation, planning strategies, school education, comparative analysis, digitalisation, European experience.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How to Become a Full-Time Law Professor – A Workshop for Aspirants

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Human Rights Due Diligence in the U.N. Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Revolutionary Constitutions and Their Constitutionalism

  2025-10-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Constitutions are studied as rational expressions of political calculus aligned in time, space, and place. But constitutional emergence from the womb of conflict is born in emotion – anger, vindication, joy, and faith in a shared future. There is a semiotics of constitutional emotion; and a connection between the semiotics of constitutive emotion and constitutional text – as norm and form. It is the state and profundity of that emotion, perhaps more than the calculus of rational governance, that propels a people to statehood, and statehood to take its particular form. The state of emotion must be maintained, honoured, and performed, if it is to carry the state forward from the moment of its emergence, through the long period of time when the founding generation, and their emotional imaginaries are long dead, and the context in which that emotion was felt and understood become incomprehensible outside of its time. It is to the preservation of that emotional explosion, and its alignment with core constitutional text, that constitutions devote time and effort, usually in its preambular text, and sometimes in extraconstitutional documents with quasi-constitutional significance. If powerful enough, the emotive semiotic of constitutional explosion can affect not just its political community but those of other political communities looking for a way to rationalise and direct their own collective political emotion. This contribution examines three distinct but powerful instances of emotive semiotics shaping collective constitutional meaning-making. The first is that of the US Constitution; the second is that of the People's Republic of China (1949); the third is that of the Republic of Cuba (1976). Each expresses anger-driven clusters of emotion with constitutive effect but forms very different starting and ending points. Each textualises that anger differently – the United States in its extra-constitutional Declaration of Independence; the Chinese in their preambular documents as well as in the constitution of the Communist Party of China; and the Cubans in their preambular text with a connection to other textual memorialisations of emotion. The contribution is organised as follows. First a brief theoretical introduction to the manifestation of a semiotics of constitutional emotion. Second, a deeper analysis of the signification of preambular and extraconstitutional text as memory and as an intensification of direction with respect to constitutional framing and interpretation. The contribution ends with an examination of the effects of differences in time, space, and place on this semiotic performance. The focus will be on the way that emotive context – a revolution to preserve traditional values; a communist revolution within a multi-state imperial power; and a revolution with a long fuse grounded in anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism.

  PublisherDOI

• Cuba and the Constitution of a Stable State of Misery: Ideology, Economic Policy, and Popular Discipline

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Trust platforms: The digitalization of corporate governance and the transformation of trust in polycentric space

  Regulation & Governance · 2024-07-25 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This contribution considers the revolution in the concept and practice of trust in corporate governance that first moved from trust in “people” to trust in “compliance,” setting the stage for the digitization of trust measures and the digitalization of compliance. Part One examines the fundamental challenge, one that arises from the near simultaneous shift in cultural expectations about trust from trust in character to trust in measurement, and then the rise of cultures of data driven systems of compliance and accountability. Part Two then considers the transformation brought by challenge responses in the form of three closely interlinked impulses: digitization, digitalization of compliance‐accountability regimes, and the emergence of platforms as spaces for trust interactions among stakeholders. Part Three then examines the current shape of these iterative dialectics, including connections between platforms and polycentric trust governance, and the detachment of trust from the entity that is its subject.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Law and Social Credit in China: An Introduction

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rachel Anderson

  82 shared

• Mary Eshelman

  Stanford University

  82 shared

• Wilfred E. Richard

  National Museum of Natural History

  82 shared

• Anna Chou

  University of Nevada, Las Vegas

  81 shared

• William Boyd

  Virginia Tech

  81 shared

• Jan M. Broekman

  KU Leuven

  79 shared

• Keren Wang

  Pennsylvania State University

  7 shared

• Jena Martin

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Law

  University of Wisconsin-Madison

  1990

• Other, Law

  University of Wisconsin-Madison

  1987

• B.A., Political Science

  University of Wisconsin-Madison

  1984