Matthew Hamilton, a Ph.D. student in the Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program, has recently published several essays and white papers for the Edley Center on Law & Democracy and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Each of his Carnegie essays examine facets of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement in the context of today’s rapid geoeconomic and geopolitical changes. He advocates reforms that draw on the lessons of Bretton Woods to help construct a new international order, rather than an approach that seeks to realign the governance of the global economy with emerging geopolitical trends.
“Admittedly, the world that awaits at the end of this pathway to a reformed international economic order is still far from clear. But each week provides new reminders of the urgent need for the world’s main economic powers to chart this course,” he writes in “Reform or Realignment? The Geopolitical Lessons of Bretton Woods.” “The successes of the postwar multilateral system were imperfect, but they contributed to an enduring peace. The alternative course of realignment risks taking us in a more dangerous direction, reminiscent of the fateful spiral of the interwar years.”
The second essay, “What Is Bretton Woods? The Contested Pasts and Potential Futures of International Economic Order,” dives into the different interpretations of the system that emerged from World War II and explains how those perspectives could inform new plans for structuring international economic relations.
Hamilton is also pursuing a J.D. at New York University School of Law. His research focuses on the dynamic between law, globalization, and international order, including the role of private law in the construction of global markets and the history of economic and political thought. During the 2024-25 academic year, he was an inaugural doctoral fellow at the law school’s Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory.
His projects for the Edley Center are part of its series of white papers that serve as accessible explainers about the principles of law and democracy. “Continuity, Change And Contestation: Executive Power at the Start of the Second Trump Administration” examines executive authority as exercised during the first months of the Trump administration, situating new assertions of presidential power in their historical legal context and identifying their implications for American democracy.
His newest white paper, “The President’s Economy? The Law of Tariffs and Democracy,” considers the Supreme Court’s review of the Trump Administration’s IEEPA-based tariffs, and situates this dispute over IEEPA in relation to other tariff authorities that Congress has delegated to the President. Building on his other recent work, Hamilton considers how these authorities pose difficulties for building a reformed international economic order that can facilitate effective democratic governance.