Will Bateman
  |
Will Bateman is a professor at the Australian National University, College of Law, Governance and Policy. He studies the political, legal and constitutional regulation of public and private finance, with a special focus on central banking, sovereign debt markets, digital currencies, sustainable investing and crisis finance. His current projects study: fiscal functions of monetary policy under large debt loads; war finance; foreign-currency operations of central banks before, during and after trade liberalisation; non-economic functions of monetary policy; and the constitutional legitimacy of economic policy.
Will Bateman is also interested in the regulation of artificial intelligence in collaboration with computer science experts and public/private sector organisations. His current focus is on sovereign artificial intelligence (AI), and the impact of generative AI on liberal democracy and the rule of law. He maintains a long-standing interest in the political economy of constitutions.
In September 2026, Will Bateman joins the Paris IAS for a ten-month research stay.
Research topics
Law; political economy and history of central banking; sovereign debt; international finance and constitutionalism.
Monetary authority and (de-)liberalisation: constitutional dimensions of foreign currency activities in advanced economies
The project seeks to understand how central banks’ activities in foreign currencies fit within the practice and theory of democratic constitutionalism, particularly as liberal economic and political systems experience substantial change. It approaches that topic by studying the foreign currency activities of two reserve-currency issuing central banks (The Eurosystem/Banque de France The United States Federal Reserve System), one highly-traded-currency issuing central bank (The Swiss National Bank) and one central-bank controlled private bank (Continuous-Linked Settlement Bank) between 1995 and 2025. The temporal boundary is designed to capture the continuity and change of constitutional and financial practices between ‘Great Moderation’ conditions of the 1990s, the shocks of the financial crisis from 2007, and the gradual de-liberalisation of trade, finance and constitutional politics from 2020.
The project will generate new knowledge on long-standing questions of the compatibility of monetary authority in market economies with norms of democratic constitutionalism. Recognising the epochal shifts of our time, the project will contribute to debates across social science disciplines on the de-liberalisation of geopolitics, economic policy and constitutionalism. It forms part of a broader intellectual aim to propose a reworking of democratic constitutional theory so as to include public economic institutions.
Key publications
Will Bateman, The Fiscal Fed: How the US Central Bank Funds Government, University of Chicago Press, 2026, 208p
Will Bateman, The Law of Monetary Finance under Unconventional Monetary Policy, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 2021, 41(4), 929-964
DOI: 10.1093/ojls/gqab008
Will Bateman, Public Finance and Parliamentary Constitutionalism, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 282p
DOI: 10.1017/9781108784283
|
|
|
|
|
|