Mark Weidemaier, Ralph M. Stockton Jr. Distinguished Professor at UNC School of Law, hosts the podcast Clauses & Controversies about international finance and sovereign debt, with Mitu Gulati, John V. Ray Research Professor of Law at UVA Law.
“We started it during the pandemic, mostly for students, but the audience has grown to about 30,000 listeners and includes people in prominent positions at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere,” says Weidemaier.
What prompted you to start the podcast? Is this a project that had been in the works before 2020, or was it prompted by the pandemic’s trend towards moving our lives virtual?
At first, it was to keep ourselves and our students entertained during online teaching. We got to talk to people we admired, and our students got to hear from reporters, lawyers and academics who worked on the problems they studied in class.
We kept going because we enjoyed it, and because Leanna Doty, our amazing producer does all the hard technical work.
Who should listen to Clauses & Controversies? Is your audience mainly listeners with a law or finance background?
Anyone interested in sovereign debt, but also anyone interested in history or economics. We are lawyers, but the questions we ask have other dimensions. For instance, we’ve had a few episodes about unpaid sovereign debt issued by the pre-Communist Chinese government nearly a century ago. Lawyers might want to know whether that debt can still be enforced today. (Maybe!) But it makes no sense to ask that question without a good sense of the history.
Or to use a modern example, we have episodes about “green” sovereign bonds, where governments say they will spend the borrowed funds on climate adaptation, but the loan contracts actually let the government spend the money however it wants. To a lawyer, that’s puzzling. Our economist and political scientist friends come at the puzzle from a different angle.
Not many people have a podcast host as a professor. What do you hope for your students to gain from sharing this with them?
I hope it gives them a sense of how international finance and sovereign debt connect to the real-world problems that brought them to law school. UNC students are so thoughtful and engaged with the world, but not all of them have been exposed to these topics before. And I also hope it gives them a sense of just how many professional roles there are for lawyers to play in solving important problems.
What has surprised you most about creating the podcast?
The range of listeners. I’ve made new connections with people from all over the world, just because they reach out after listening to an episode.
Listen now: Clauses & Controversies
