Biography

Jedidiah Kroncke is an associate professor of law at the University of Hawaii, joining the faculty in August of 2026. He currently teaches contracts, business associations, and a seminar on the law of cooperative economics.

Previously, Prof. Kroncke taught at the University of Hong Kong and the FGV São Paulo School of Law, and before this, he was a Senior Fellow at the East Asian Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School. Prof. Kroncke earned a B.A. in Asian Studies and Legal Studies from the University of California, Berkeley; a J.D. from Yale Law School; and a Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. During and after his graduate studies, he was awarded a range of fellowships, including the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fellowship at Yale Law School, the Samuel I. Golieb Fellowship in Legal History at NYU Law, and the Berger-Howe Fellowship in Legal History at Harvard Law School. He has been awarded visiting positions at the International University College of Turin, National University of Singapore, Seoul National University, and the University of Tokyo.

Prof. Kroncke’s research centers on international legal history and the comparative study of alternative business structures. His interdisciplinary work draws on the US, Chinese, and Brazilian legal experiences, and is devoted to the productive indigenization of comparative legal analysis. He routinely presents his work at leading law schools across the globe and is a reviewer for a wide range of high-impact international journals and academic presses. He was the first Associate Editor for comparative and non-Western history at the Law & History Review and a founding editor of the Journal of Law and Political Economy.

His book, The Futility of Law and Development: China and the Dangers of Exporting American Law (Oxford University Press), explores the role of U.S.-China relations in the formation of modern American legal internationalism and the decline of American legal cosmopolitanism. The book was recently translated by Chinese University Press of Hong Kong, with a new preface and epilogue. Previous publications have addressed law and development, authoritarian law, the link between domestic legal innovation and comparative law, and a variety of subjects related to alternative property, labor, and trust institutions. He frequently writes reviews and commentaries for JOTWELL and the LPE Blog.

His current projects focus on the relationship between law and economic democracy and the desire for “purpose-based” forms of business entities. He continues to work on how shifting geopolitics reshapes the social and financial terrain of international legal interactions, as well as new forms of regulatory arbitrage.

Recent Publications

The Permissive Invisibility of Trust Law, 22 Int’l J.L. Context 1 (2026)

Carsun Chang’s Jefferson: A Lost Era of Transnational Sino-American Constitutional

Imagination (w/Haimo Li), 43 Law & Hist. Rev. 1 (2025)

The Law and Political Economy of Workplace Organization, Research Handbook for Political Economy and Law (Elgar, 2025)

Sino-American (De)Coupling: Economic Integration Through De-Democratizing Work, 63 Colum. J. Transnat’l L. 326 (2025)

Legal Complicity in an Age of Resilient Authoritarianism, 38 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 75 (2025)

An Empire of Anti-Democracy: The Imperial Legacies of American Territorial Labor, 99 Wash. L. Rev. 1201 (2024)

The Global Scope of Competitive Legalities in the Early 19th-Century South China Sea: The Topaz Incident (w/Haimo Li), 35 Eur. J. Int’l L. 929 (2024)

Failed Dreams of Transformative Legal Education: The (Non)-Americanization of East Asian Lawyers, 48 Fordham J. Int’l L. 53 (2024)

Full List of Publications

SSRN  |  Research Gate  | OUP