Professor Jia is a scholar of comparative and transnational law, with particular focus on the United States and China. His research broadly seeks to understand the relationship between law and authoritarianism and between law and geopolitics. Recent works have addressed questions of constitutional law, international law, privacy law, conflict of laws, legal interpretation, and legal theory.

Professor Jia’s scholarship has been published in the University of Chicago Law Review, the New York University Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Texas Law Review, and other journals. His articles have won several awards, including the 2022 Mark Tushnet Prize (Association of American Law Schools), the 2024 International Law and Technology Interest Group Scholarship Prize (American Society of International Law), and the 2025 Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award (The Future of Privacy Forum).

Before joining the academy, Professor Jia was an appellate lawyer and law clerk to Justice David Souter and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge William Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He is a graduate of Princeton University, Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and Harvard Law School, where he was Articles Co-Chair of the Harvard Law Review.