Yong-Shik Lee

Yong-Shik Lee is a lawyer, economist, and international relations scholar with internationally-recognized authority in law and development and international trade law. He is currently Director and Professorial Fellow of the Law and Development Institute. He has also taught and conducted academic research at prominent universities throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia for twenty years. He graduated in economics with academic distinction from the University of California at Berkeley and received law degrees from the University of Cambridge (B.A., M.A., Ph.D). He is licensed to practice law in multiple jurisdictions, including United States (California, North Carolina) and United Kingdom.

Author of Reclaiming Development in the World Trading System (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 2016), Safeguard Measures in World Trade: The Legal Analysis (Edward Elgar, 3rd ed. 2014), Microtrade: A New System of International Trade with Volunteerism Towards Poverty Elimination (co-authored, Routledge, 2013), and Law and Development: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2019), Professor Lee has published over one hundred academic articles, books, chapters, and shorter notes with leading publishers in North America, Europe, and Asia, in the areas of international economic law, law and development, development/institutional economics, comparative law, and international commercial arbitration. He pioneered academic research on safeguard measures (emergency import restraint measures) and developed the concept of “microtrade,” a new system of international trade designed to alleviate populations of the least-developed countries of extreme poverty. He has also developed the “General Theory of Law and Development” and the “New General Theory of Development Economics,” which examines the causal mechanisms by which law impacts development and analyzes the constituent elements of economic development, respectively. He is currently an associate editor of the Journal of World Trade and the founding editor-in-chief of the Law and Development Review.

Professor Lee participated in a number of bilateral and multilateral negotiations on international trade and investment at international forums such as the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law. He has appeared before WTO dispute settlement panels and the WTO Appellate Body as a government counsel, and advised national governments, international law firms, and consulting companies on international trade and development projects and major international commercial arbitration cases. He has frequently spoken on issues of international economic law, law and development, and the WTO through over seventy speech engagements, at prominent forums such as Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and the World Bank.