Mark Sidel

Faculty Webpage

Mark Sidel

Biography

Sidel is Doyle-Bascom Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also serves as Chair in Global Justice (visiting) at the University of Liverpool School of Law and Social Justice, and a board member at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL); the China Medical Board; Give2Asia; and Latitude Global. Sidel’s academic work focuses on civil society and philanthropy and state-society relations in China, India, Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia, and in the United States. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute (ALI).

Previously Sidel served as the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation Visiting Chair in Community Philanthropy at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University; President of the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR), the international academic association working to strengthen research on civil society, philanthropy and the nonprofit sector; and in other academic and professional roles.

Earlier Sidel served in program positions with the Ford Foundation in Beijing, Hanoi, Bangkok, and New Delhi. His advising and consulting assignments have included Indevelop/SIDA (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, on human rights programs in China); DANIDA (Danish Development Cooperation Agency, on human rights and legal reform programs in Vietnam); the Ford Foundation (on legal reform programs in China); the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights (on human rights and legal reform programming in China and Vietnam); the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (on philanthropic law and policy in China); and other international and donor organizations.

Professor Sidel has served as Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Melbourne Law School, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po, in the chaire Asie), Victoria, Vermont, and Miami law schools and other institutions, and as W. G. Hart Lecturer in Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London. In 2008 he won the ICNL-Cordaid Civil Liberties Prize for his work on the impact of anti-terrorism law on civil society in comparative perspective, and in 2012 he was named to the Outstanding Academic Award by the Nonprofit Organizations Committee of the American Bar Association, Business Law Section. He is a graduate of Princeton University (A.B. in history), Yale University (M.A. in history), and Columbia Law School (J.D., 1985).