What I’m Working On: Professor Mark Jia, Comparative Law Scholar
January 22, 2025

Prof. Mark Jia
As a comparative and transnational law scholar focused on the United States and China, Professor Mark Jia is guided by two questions: What is the relationship between the law and authoritarianism, and what is the relationship between the law and geopolitics?
“These are interesting questions intellectually, but they’re also pressing in light of authoritarian retrenchment and democratic backsliding around the world,” says Jia, who in 2022 joined the Georgetown Law faculty as an associate professor of law after serving as a fellow and lecturer at Harvard Law School. Before joining academia, Jia was an appellate lawyer and law clerk to Justice David Souter and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the United States Supreme Court and studied comparative politics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.
“There continue to be big, unanswered questions about these relationships that deserve a lot more careful thinking,” he says.
Below, Jia discusses his recent scholarship on the American and Chinese legal systems, balancing philosophy and pragmatism as a legal scholar and the importance of nuanced public discourse on China.
What are you working on?
I’m currently writing a paper that advances a general theory of how nation-states project power through law. I’m focused most immediately on law in U.S.-China rivalry, but I hope to say something more broadly about what it means to speak of “legal power” and why concepts like lawfare are not always the most helpful lens for analyzing uses of law transnationally. This past May, I took a research trip to China — my first since the pandemic — to inform a forthcoming law review article about constitutional education that uses the U.S. and China as case studies. I’m also working on two book chapters: the first, “Interpreting Authoritarian Law,” is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook on Law and Authoritarianism. The second is the China chapter for a book on key constitutional moments in a number of Asian countries.
You write frequently about aspects of Chinese law and about U.S.-China relations. Broadly speaking, would you describe your scholarly approach as more philosophical, or more pragmatic?
It depends on the project. Some have more of a normative, prescriptive component to them, in that they propose practical solutions to a problem. In “American Law in the New Global Conflict” (New York University Law Review), for example, I express concern that U.S.-China conflict has led to a diminishment of rights and liberties for certain groups in the United States and an expansion of executive power, and I propose interventions, such as new intra-branch checks on executive power.
In contrast, in a piece like “High Theory and Chinese Law” (Texas Law Review), I’m thinking less directly about practical interventions and more about trying to improve how we theorize and understand Chinese law. Still, there are practical implications to my theoretical analysis. One is that academics should be careful about how we describe or portray Chinese law to external audiences. It’s one thing to debate amongst ourselves as scholars, it’s another to distill China’s legal system in a helpful way for non-specialists, including judges and policymakers.
What misunderstandings about China and Chinese law persist in the U.S. today?
I do think we are beginning to lose nuance in our public discourse on China. If you read think tank pieces on Chinese privacy law produced here in Washington, D.C., for example, a good number of them essentially portray Chinese privacy law as geopolitically motivated, that is, of China wanting to “beat us.” In my view that’s wrong, or at best incomplete, and demonstrates how current geopolitical dynamics are beginning to distort how we perceive reality. In “Authoritarian Privacy” (University of Chicago Law Review), I argue that there is actually a lot of popular demand for data privacy laws in China given widespread data theft and abuse, and that the new laws are more analogous to food safety or environmental protection laws than anything else. That’s not to say that Chinese law resembles privacy law in democracies — it doesn’t — but it does suggest we should pause a bit before defaulting to geopolitical explanations for everything China does.
Why study comparative law?
I teach a seminar on law and authoritarianism here at the Law Center. Most of the students take the class not only to learn about foreign law, but to better contextualize what’s been happening in the U.S. as well. Comparative law not only helps us better understand our own legal system — it can also point us to how to change or improve it.