Center Leadership and Staff
James V. Feinerman, Faculty Director
A leading scholar of Asian law, Professor Feinerman is the James M. Morita Professor of Asian Legal Studies and also the Associate Dean for Transnational Programs. He is also the Faculty Director of the Center For Asian Law. Professor Feinerman joined the Law Center faculty as a visiting professor for the 1985-86 academic year. Immediately after law school he studied in the People’s Republic of China. Subsequently, he joined the New York firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell as a corporate associate. During 1982-83, Professor Feinerman was Fulbright Lecturer on Law at Peking University. In 1986, he was a Fulbright researcher in Japan. In 1989, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship to study China’s practice of international law. During the 1992-93 academic year, he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. From 1993-95, on leave from the Law Center, Professor Feinerman was the Director of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China. Professor Feinerman served as Editor-in-Chief of the ABA’s China Law Reporter from 1986-1998. Also, Professor Feinerman was the Co-editor of The Limits of the Rule of Law in China (2001), and Co-Author of China After the WTO:What You Need to Know Now (2001).
Thomas E. Kellogg, Executive Director
Thomas E. Kellogg is Executive Director of the Center for Asian Law, where he oversees various programs related to law and governance in Asia. He is a leading scholar of legal reform in China, Chinese constitutionalism, and civil society movements in China.
Prior to joining Georgetown Law, Kellogg was Director of the East Asia Program at the Open Society Foundations. At OSF, he oversaw the expansion of the Foundation’s work in China, and also launched its work on Taiwan and North and South Korea. During his time at OSF, Kellogg focused most closely on civil society development, legal reform, and human rights. He also oversaw work on a range of other issues, including public health, environmental protection, and media development.
Kellogg has written widely on law and politics in China, US-China relations, and Asian geopolitics. He has lectured on Chinese law at a number of universities in the United States, China, and Europe. He has also taught courses on Chinese law at Columbia, Fordham, and Yale Law Schools.
Before joining the Open Society Foundations, Kellogg was a Senior Fellow at the China Law Center at Yale Law School. Prior to that, he worked as a researcher in the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch. He holds degrees from Harvard Law School, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Human Rights Journal, and Hamilton College.
Yvonne Tew, Faculty Scholar
Professor Yvonne Tew writes and teaches constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, and comparative law and religion, with regional expertise in Asia. She is the author of Constitutional Statecraft in Asian Courts (forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2020). Her scholarship has been published in several law journals including the Virginia Journal of International Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, American Journal of Comparative Law, Cambridge Law Journal, and Washington International Law Journal as well as in several book collections published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Edward Elgar Publishing. She is currently a guest columnist for the I-CONnect Blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law.
Professor Tew holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the Distinction in Research Prize in the Arts and Humanities in 2012 by St. Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. While at the University of Cambridge, she served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Student Law Review (the flagship student-run law review). She received her first law degree from the University of Cambridge graduating with Double First Class Honors. She then graduated with a Master of Laws (LL.M.) from Harvard Law School after winning the Cambridge-Harvard Law Link scholarship awarded to the top two final-year law graduates from the University of Cambridge admitted to Harvard Law School. She is a member of the New York state bar. Before joining the Georgetown Law faculty, she taught at Columbia Law School as an Associate-in-Law postdoctoral research fellow and was a Hauser Global Research Fellow at the New York University School of Law.
Mark Jia, Faculty Scholar
Professor Jia specializes in comparative and transnational law, with particular interest in the United States and China. His articles have been or will be published in the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Virginia Journal of International Law, and the American Journal of Comparative Law. His article, “Illiberal Law in American Courts,” was awarded the 2022 Mark Tushnet Prize by the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Comparative Law.
Before coming to Georgetown, Professor Jia was a fellow and lecturer at Harvard Law School. He clerked for 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, Oxford, where he studied as a U.S. Rhodes Scholar, and Harvard Law School, where he was an articles co-chair of the Harvard Law Review. He is the National Secretary of the Rhodes Scholarships for China.
Leann Deckert, Senior Program Coordinator
Leann Deckert is the Senior Program Coordinator for both the Center for Asian Law and the Denny Center for Democratic Capitalism. She previously served as a Program Associate with the Georgetown Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues.
Deckert holds a B.A. in Foreign Affairs & East Asian Studies from the University of Virginia, an LLM in International Relations from Xiamen University, and a Master of Professional Studies in Applied Intelligence from the Georgetown School of Continuing Studies.
Law Fellows
Eric Yan-ho Lai, Research Fellow
Eric Yan-ho Lai is a research fellow with the Georgetown Center for Asian Law, where he observes and analyses the development of the rule of law and judicial independence in the context of China-Hong Kong relations. He received his PhD degree in law at SOAS University of London in 2022. His research focuses on the dynamics of legal transplant and legal professionalism in authoritarian regimes; he also studies law and politics, social movement, contentious politics and international human rights practices in Hong Kong and China. His publication can be found in academic journals such as Communist and Post-communist Studies, Journal of Asian and African Studies and the Hong Kong Law Journal.
Before joining Georgetown Law, Lai was a lecturer in political science at several universities in Hong Kong. From 2018 to 2019, he was a visiting fellow at the Center of Comparative and Public Law at the University of Hong Kong, where he conducted research on the development of legal profession and access to justice in Hong Kong. Lai was also a human rights advocate when he served in several civil society organizations in Hong Kong.
Lai is a political and legal commentator in various traditional and digital media outlets in Hong Kong, Europe and North America. He writes opinion articles on law and politics, judicial activism and international human rights. He is currently a member of Asian Civil Society Research Network at the University of Melbourne, and an associate fellow at the Hong Kong Studies Hub at the University of Surrey.
Adjunct Faculty
Joongi Kim
Professor Kim is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for International Affairs at Yonsei Law School in Seoul, Korea. He has published widely on corporate governance, international trade, dispute resolution and corruption. He was the Founding Executive Director of the Hills Governance Center in Korea and previously held professorship positions at Hongik University and the National University of Singapore, and practiced at Foley & Lardner in Washington, D.C. He presently acts as an Academic Council Member for the CSIS’s Hills Program on Governance, an Advisor to the ICC Korea’s Commercial Law and Practice Section, a Special Advisor to the Council for the Korean Pact on Anti-Corruption and Transparency, and an Editorial Board Member of Corporate Ownership and Control, International Trade Law and Korean Arbitration Review. He received his academic degrees from Columbia (BA), Yonsei (MA) and Georgetown (JD).