How and why do some states engage intensively and extensively in international legal cooperation to counter transnational crime, while others do not? The question is important because transnational crime—including terrorism, money laundering, human trafficking, drug trafficking, and corruption—have serious implications for economic and physical security in many countries around the world, including the United States.

We are interested in examining the question of transnational legal cooperation by looking at participation in institutions, documenting the density of “cooperative transactions” such as extraditions, and plumbing the development of trust relationships across and among the entities concerned. We will focus on legal cooperation among various public entities such as governments, departments of justice, foreign offices, prosecutors, and potentially major police departments.

We want to develop a theory of transnational legal cooperation that involves not only power relations among actors, but also sociological connections essential to develop trust. Since we have found that there are barriers to the collection of relevant transactional data that would facilitate testing various theories of cooperation, this exploratory seminar will bring together individuals in the policy world and scholars at Harvard to determine which data and methods are most amenable to exploring these issues.