Jiajun Luo

Assistant Professor

Public Law; Comparative Law; Legal Empowerment & Access to Justice; Courts; Socio-Legal and Critical Approaches

School of Law
S2.06, Social Sciences Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom

Jiajun.Luo.2@warwick.ac.uk

Bio

Dr Jiajun Luo is an Assistant Professor at Warwick 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 is interdisciplinary and empirically grounded, drawing on public law, socio-legal studies, law and society, and critical 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.

Jiajun 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 Warwick, Jiajun 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 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, China.

A Shenzhen native and a Hongkonger, Jiajun has extensive research experience in Chinese law and legal institutions and is a native speaker of Cantonese and Mandarin.

Scholarship

Research

Jiajun’s research lies at the intersection of public law, comparative law and socio-legal studies, with a particular focus on legal processes and dispute resolution. His work examines how legal institutions operate in practice, including how they structure access and participation, mediate relationships between individuals and state power, and distribute or constrain public power. While China is an important empirical site for much of his research, he uses it to engage with broader comparative and theoretical questions about law, institutions and public power.

Current Projects

His current projects examine state-orchestrated legal empowerment, algorithmic standardisation and judicial governance in authoritarian smart courts, and anti-SLAPP as a constitutional blind spot in post-war liberal democracies.

He is also developing a book project on inequality and institutional dynamics in Chinese courts, based on his doctoral research. He is exploring decolonising and critical approaches to comparative law.

Impact and Engagement

Jiajun regularly contributes public-facing writing that brings his research to wider audiences and informs public and policy debate. His work has been cited by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China. He has provided expert input to international and legal institutions and served as an expert witness in legal proceedings in the United States and the United Kingdom. He is also an Affiliated Scholar with the Lawyers and Democratic Decline project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He also regularly participates in international conferences and workshops, including the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, the ICON•S Annual Conference, the European China Law Studies Association Annual Conference, and workshops at Oxford and Academia Sinica.

Publications

Journal Articles

Jiajun Luo, “Internalizing Public Disputes: The Rise of China’s Administrative Reconsideration under Xi,” Hague Journal on the Rule of Law 17 (2025): 401–425.

Jiajun Luo, “Authoritarian Legal (Ir)rationality: The Saga of ‘Picking Quarrels’ in China,”Asian-Pacific Law & Policy Journal25(3) (2024): 103–171.

Book Chapter

Jiajun Luo and Shuyu Chu, “China's challenge to liberal democracy” in Glenn Patmore (ed.), Research Handbook on Law and Democracy(Edward Elgar, 2026).

Teaching

Jiajun teaches public law at Warwick. In 2026–27, he contributes to Law, State and the Individual and Comparative Human Rights.

Before joining Warwick, he taught or contributed to courses at the New York University, University of Hong Kong, Georgetown University, and the University of Virginia. His teaching has covered public law, comparative constitutional law, human rights, Chinese law, and law and society.

His teaching emphasises comparative and socio-legal approaches, encouraging students to critically examine how legal institutions operate in practice, situate legal doctrine within its broader institutional and social contexts, and engage with questions of governance, inequality, and public power.

Research Supervision

Jiajun’s areas of research supervision include public law, comparative law, socio-legal studies, Chinese law and legal institutions, courts and judicial governance, dispute resolution, and access to justice.

He is particularly interested in interdisciplinary and comparative research examining how legal institutions operate in practice and how law structures relationships between individuals and public power. He is open to potential co-supervision in areas that closely intersect with his research expertise.