Visiting Scholars
The U.S.-Asia Law Institute hosts a small number of outstanding scholars each year. Our visiting scholars have included judges, prosecutors, lawyers, legal journalists, and legislators as well as academics. Learn more about how to become a USALI Visiting Scholar.
Kai-Chieh Hsu
KJ Hsu is a criminal judge in the IP division and a Ph.D. candidate in Taiwan. He specializes in IP law, patent strategy, and use of empirical methods to discuss judicial issues, such as the death penalty, judicial reform, and judicial trust. As a member of the Judges Association of Taiwan, he has been a representative at many international conferences. He received his LL.B, LL.M, and MBA from National Taiwan University. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the College of Management, National Taiwan University. During his time at the USALI, he will focus on AI-related issues for sentencing, judgment performance enhancement, and judicial trust promotion for judges in Taiwan. Furthermore, he will research geopolitical issues in the electronics industry between Taiwan and China.
Jinchun Shu
Jinchun Shu is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at Guanghua Law School, Zhejiang University in China. He holds a particular interest in platform regulation, data privacy law, and artificial intelligence law. He has participated in several projects researching data legislation in China. His previous publications centered on children’s personal information protection and the legal paradigms of cross-border data transfer. During his visit to USALI, he will focus on China’s approach to construct and reconcile data privacy laws in the name of national security. He also will research the distinct approaches adopted by China, the EU, and the US to regulate artificial intelligence.
Masahiko Kinoshita
Masahiko Kinoshita is a professor at Kobe University, Graduate School of Law in Japan. His focus is Japanese constitutional law and comparative constitutional law. He obtained his BA in international relations from the University of Tokyo's College of Arts and Sciences in 2004. By 2007, he had earned his JD from that university's School of Law and passed the Japanese bar examination. Masahiko's academic journey includes positions as an assistant professor and lecturer at the University of Tokyo, as well as a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School's East Asian Legal Studies. He holds the title of distinguished senior fellow at the University of Texas at Austin's Constitutional Studies Program. Beyond his teaching and research, Masahiko serves as the editorial representative for a leading constitutional law casebook widely used in Japanese law schools. His current research includes a detailed examination of the Japanese Supreme Court's stance on constitutional review, emphasizing the strategic deference approach.
Xihao Xu
Xihao Xu is a Ph.D. candidate at Nankai University Law School in China. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in law from the Northwest University of Political Science and Law in 2019 and his LL.M degree from Renmin University of China in 2021. He researches comparative administrative law, focusing on internal administration and digital governance in China and the United States. His previous publications focused on the agency coordination system in China. During his time at USALI, he will conduct comparative research into the internal administrative law of China and the United States. Xihao has served as a research assistant at the Food Safety Collaborative Innovation Center of Renmin University of China and the Medical and Health Law Research Center of Nankai University. Xihao became executive editor of the Chaoyang Law Review in 2022.
Xinyi Pan
Xinyi PAN is a Ph.D. Candidate in International Law at Tsinghua University, P.R.C, supervised by Professor Bingbing JIA. Her dissertation is about the role and function of international law in the International Community, mainly concerning the subjects of philosophy of law, International organization law, and international politics. Before entering Tsinghua University in 2022, She obtained an LL.B. from Shandong University, P.R.C.(Thesis Supervisor: Professor Zuoli JIANG) in 2020, and an LL.M. from the National University of Singapore (Thesis Supervisor: Professor Simon Chesterman) in 2021. Besides, she passed the Chinese bar examination in 2019 and was awarded a scholarship to attend the Hague Academy of International Law 2022 summer courses. She speaks Mandarin, English, basic Korean, and French. During her time at USALI, she will study the development of public international legal theory, the related practice of international law in the US and China, and focus on the formation of legal regulation of public domains, particulrly cyberspace.
Eungi Hong
Eungi Hong has been a judge in South Korea since 2009, with her current appointment in the Seoul Central District Court. From 2021 to 2022, she served as a professor at the Judicial Research and Training Institute of the Supreme Court of Korea, overseeing judges' training programs. During this time, she taught civil and criminal procedures to law school students and newly appointed judges, and participated as a speaker in international judicial conferences. Her professional focus centers on the domestic implementation of international human rights instruments. She is an active member of both the Korean Judges Association of Gender Law and the Korean Judges Association of International Human Rights Law, contributing through case reviews on international law matters. She holds an LL.M. from Columbia Law School and an LL.B. from Seoul National University. At USALI, she researches the legal status of undocumented immigrant children from the perspective of international law.
Bin Yang
Yang Bin is a Chinese defense lawyer. Before that she was a prosecutor in the Guangzhou People’s Procuratorate at the district and municipal level for 23 years. During that time she handled a number of high-profile cases and received numerous honors including the Guangdong May 1st Labor Medal in 2011, China Top Ten People of Justice in 2011, and Outstanding Public Prosecutor of Guangzhou in 1998. She has been a visiting scholar at the China Research Service Centre of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and was awarded the Elisabeth-Selbert-Initiative Scholarship as a human rights defender for a six-month study visit to Berlin in 2023.