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).

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.

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.

Eric Yan-ho Lai

Hong Kong Law Fellow

Eric Yan-ho Lai is the Hong Kong Law Fellow of 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 Mainland-Hong Kong relations. He received his master’s degree in Political Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science as a Chevening Scholar in 2013 and is currently a PhD Candidate in Law at SOAS University of London. His doctoral 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 electoral integrity in Hong Kong and China.

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. In 2019, He co-founded Hong Kong Election Observation Project, a research-based initiative under the Comparative Governance and Policy Research Center at Hong Kong Baptist University. Lai was also a human rights activist who served in several civil society alongside social movement organizations in Hong Kong.

Lai is a political commentator in in a number of traditional and digital media in Hong Kong and Europe. He writes opinion articles on law and politics, electoral integrity, judicial activism, international human rights and religious freedom. He is authoring his first book, Politics of the Rule of Law: Authoritarian Law-based Governance in Hong Kong (in Chinese), which will be published in 2021.

Jiajun Luo

China Law Fellow

Jiajun Luo is the China Law Fellow at the Georgetown Center for Asian Law. Luo’s work primarily centers on the People’s Republic of China’s legal development in the broader context of comparative law and area studies. Using China as an example, Luo’s work explores new paradigms of legality and rationalization of statecraft in authoritarian regimes. His current project at GCAL focuses on criminalizing freedom of expression in the PRC. He also studies other contentious areas where Chinese law, politics, and society intersect.

Luo is also a Ph.D. candidate at the faculty of law, University of Hong Kong. Luo’s doctoral dissertation, Unequal Justice Delivered by the Chinese Courts, examines systemic differential treatment in the Chinese courtrooms in key areas of law, and explains the historical roots and institutional factors that account for that inequality. The thesis draws heavily on empirical data, including on-site observation and interviews with judges, government officials, and lawyers in China.  

Luo was a visiting researcher at Cornell Law School in 2017, and holds a research-intensive Master of Law degree from the University of British Columbia in Canada. He received his first law degree with distinction in China.

Shuyu Chu

China Law & Policy Fellow

Shuyu Chu is the China Law & Policy Fellow at the Georgetown Center for Asian Law. Chu’s research examines the role of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China’s legal system, and China’s transnational legal cooperation with other countries. Her current research at GCAL focuses on China’s globalized fugitive repatriation scheme dubbed “Operation Skynet”. It analyzes China’s growing reliance on extra-legal methods to return alleged corrupt fugitives, in hope of bypassing the challenges of human rights, legal discrepancies and diplomatic stalemate in extradition and other mutual legal assistance.

Chu is currently a PhD candidate in Law at University of Hong Kong. Her dissertation, Communist Party’s Disciplinary Infrastructure: Anti-Corruption Agency as Panoptic Control of Cadres in China, investigates the political and legal logic behind China’s centralized anti-corruption model. Other than curbing rampant corruption and cleansing top-level political rivals, she argues that anti-graft is also a critical instrument for CCP to achieve more comprehensive control of over its rank-and-file party members. The thesis provides a new paradigm for explaining China’s high-profile anti-corruption initiatives in Xi Jinping’s era, and illustrates how the legal and political institutions serve to increase the strength, coherence and resilience of the party machine.

Chu has presented her papers at acclaimed international conferences, and has research and teaching experience in the fields of comparative constitutional law, corruption, and human rights. Before pursuing PhD research, she received her LLM in Human Rights degree at HKU, one of the leading human rights law programs in the Asia-Pacific region. Chu is also committed to civil society communication and academic exchanges. She has coordinated multiple training programs for Mainland Chinese criminal defense lawyers and NGO advocates at HKU, and arranged summer programs and intensive courses for undergraduate and graduate students in Hong Kong, Macaw, Taipei, Beijing and Shanghai.

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 and an LLM in International Relations from Xiamen University. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Applied Intelligence through the Georgetown School of Continuing Studies.

Adjunct Faculty