Profile

Interests: comparative law; law and development; legislative drafting; legislation; criminal law

Professor Emeritus Robert Seidman has been a distinguished member of the School of Law faculty since 1972. His work includes several books on law and development, as well as articles on comparative law of the Third World and transitional worlds. With his wife, Adjunct Professor Ann Seidman, he has served as chief technical consultant to United Nations-sponsored programs that are helping the Chinese government achieve economic reforms and strengthen legislative drafting. Together, they have implemented similar programs in the Lao P.D.R., South Africa, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, Bhutan, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Estonia, and Indonesia.

Early in his career, Professor Seidman spent several years in private practice in New York and Connecticut. He also taught law in Africa, at the Universities of Ghana and Lagos, and at the University of Wisconsin. In addition to his teaching responsibilities at BUSL, he has served as a visiting professor at the Universities of Dar es Salaam, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and the University of the Witswatersrand, as well as a consultant to various ministries of Zimbabwe.

In 1988/1989, Professor Seidman was a Fulbright professor of law at Beijing University. He is the co-author of a number of books, including Law, Order and Power and with Ann Seidman, The State and Law in the Development Process. He is editor of Cases and Materials in the Criminal Law of Africa and author of State, Law and Development. The Seidmans are the co-editors of Legislative Drafting for Market Reforms: Some Lessons from China and Making Development Work: Legislative Reform for Institutional Transformation and Good Governance. Most recently, they have written Legislative Drafting for Democratic Social Change: A Manual for Drafters (translated into Russian, Bahasa Indonesian, and Sinhalese, with translations in print or in process in Chinese, Vietnamese, and Macedonian).