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Dr Jiajun Luo is an Assistant Professor at ¹û¶³´«Ã½ Law School. He is a comparative public law and socio-legal scholar interested in how legal institutions and dispute resolution mechanisms organise public power, structure relations between individuals and the state, and shape participation, accountability, and access to justice. His research spans courts and judicial behaviour, administrative institutions, dispute resolution, legal empowerment, authoritarian legality, and the digital transformation of legal institutions, informed by critical approaches to law, power, and inequality.

A central concern running through his work is how institutional design shapes access to law and legal institutions, enables or constrains different forms of legal and political participation, and distributes authority between individuals and public institutions. Much of his empirical research has been conducted in China, which he approaches not simply as an object of area-specific study, but as a site from which to examine and theorise broader questions about law, inequality, public authority, and institutional power across different legal and political settings.

His research is interdisciplinary and empirically grounded, drawing on public law, socio-legal studies, law and society, and comparative institutional analysis. His doctoral research examined inequality and variation in judicial behaviour across different areas of law, asking why courts and judges assume different institutional roles depending on the nature of the dispute and the parties involved. He graduated with a PhD in Law from the University of Hong Kong in 2025. His dissertation, Chinese Courts: Unequal Justice, received the Examiners’ High Commendation, awarded to work in the top 5 per cent, and was nominated for the Li Ka Shing Prize for Best PhD Dissertation.

Before joining ¹û¶³´«Ã½, Dr Luo was a Hauser Postdoctoral Global Fellow at New York University School of Law, where he was also affiliated with the US-Asia Law Institute. He previously served as a China Law Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center and as a Visiting Researcher in the Comparative Constitutional Law Stream at Cornell Law School. He has also been affiliated with the Lawyers and Democratic Decline project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He holds an LLM from the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia and an LLB summa cum laude from Shenzhen University.

Dr Luo’s published research addresses questions of administrative justice, judicial institutions, authoritarian legality, and constitutional democracy. His work has appeared in the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law and the Asian-Pacific Law & Policy Journal, and he has contributed to the Edward Elgar Research Handbook on Law and Democracy. His research and public-facing work have also informed policy and public debate. His work has been cited by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and in government reports in different jurisdictions. He has contributed expertise to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers and has served as an expert witness in US federal court proceedings and UK immigration and asylum

proceedings. He has also been interviewed or quoted by outlets including The Economist and MIT Technology Review.

Dr Luo’s current research includes projects on State-Organised Legal Empowerment (SOLE), which brings a public law perspective to legal empowerment and access to justice; Anti-SLAPP law and a post-war blind spot in constitutional democracies concerning private power and democratic participation; and decolonising and critical approaches to comparative law, including the use of Chinese legal experience to rethink established concepts and assumptions in legal scholarship.

A Shenzhen native and Hongkonger, Dr Luo is a native speaker of Cantonese and Mandarin.