Today at Brown

A practicing lawyer since 1989 who has taught at Northeastern and Harvard for 15 years, Dan Danielsen claims he has lived two parallel lives for years.

The UCLA graduate completed his J.D. cum laude from Harvard and clerked in the U.S. Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit. After a year as legal counsel in the Commission of the European Union in Brussels, Danielsen joined Foley, Hoag & Eliot LLP in Boston as an associate, then made partner.

During the same period, Danielsen taught law and published papers on law and violence and on the legal treatment of pregnancy and homosexuality and co-edited the book After Identity: A Reader in Law and Culture, a collection of contemporary essays about law and legal culture.

“Academia was a side show until 2002,” Danielsen said. After years as an adjunct professor at Northeastern’s School of Law, he asked to become a visiting professor, “to see if I wanted to go full-time.”

In 2004, Danielsen became an associate professor, beginning the research focus he has brought to Brown: an interdisciplinary approach to the study of multinational corporations and their role in shaping transnational regulation and governance. He also examines how multinationals affect social welfare, violent conflict and poverty in the developing world, bringing his expertise to positions in Luxembourg, Thailand and Chile.

Eventually, Danielsen realized that his interdisciplinary scholarship didn’t have “enough parts in the law school,” he explained. This led him to Brown and his appointment in the Taubman Center.

“What do people who are going to compete in the global society, probably with elite status, need to know?” he asks. This question drives the four brand-new courses Danielsen will teach this current academic year, each designed to serve numerous academic communities both undergraduate and graduate.

“Law, Development and Policy” looks at the complex and often indeterminate relationships between theories of development, public policy choices and the implementation of legal institutions across the developing world. “A single legal theory can effect 50 different policy decisions,” Danielsen said.

“The Corporation and Society” is a primer on a topic that affects nearly everyone, usually unwittingly. “Most people deal all the time with corporations that have enormous impact — and they don’t know a thing about them,” Danielsen said. “If you change the laws in Delaware, you change them globally.”

One case study in the seminar “Corporate Power and the Global Order” will be the water privatization and subsequent protests in Bolivia, examined from different angles: the community activists, the World Trade organization, the litigators, the government and others.

Danielsen’s fourth course, “American Legal Thought,” seeks to show the broader community that the law is an intellectual discipline. “It’s not just a profession,” he said.

He is living proof.