Professor Sida Liu

Welcome to the website of Prof. Sida Liu 刘思达 劉思達.

Sida Liu is Professor of Law and Sociology and Associate Dean (Taught Postgraduate Programmes Development) in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. Professor Liu holds courtesy appointments as Professor of Sociology (Status Only) at the University of Toronto, Vice President of the China Institute for Socio-Legal Studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Faculty Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, Affiliated Scholar of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at New York University School of Law, and Faculty Affiliate of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School.

Before joining the University of Hong Kong faculty in 2022, Professor Liu taught at the University of Toronto in 2016-2022 as Professor of Sociology, Law, and Global Affairs, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009-2016 as Assistant Professor of Sociology and Law and directed its East Asian Legal Studies Center in 2014-2016. In 2016-2017, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Professor Liu received his LL.B. from Peking University Law School and his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.

Professor Liu works in the interdisciplinary area between law and sociology (often called “law and society” or “sociolegal studies”), and he writes in English and Chinese. His research interests include sociology of law, professions, Chinese law, social theory, criminal justice, and globalization. Besides his empirical work on Chinese law and the legal profession, Professor Liu also writes on theories of law, professions, and social spaces following the Simmelian tradition of social geometry and the Chicago School of sociology.

Professor Liu is the author of five books in Chinese and English, including The Lost Polis: Transformation of the Legal Profession in Contemporary China (Peking University Press, 2008), The Logic of Fragmentation: An Ecological Analysis of the Chinese Legal Services Market (Shanghai Joint Publishing Co., 2011), Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work (with Terence C. Halliday, Cambridge University Press, 2016), The Asian Law and Society Reader (with Lynette J. Chua and David M. Engel, Cambridge University Press, 2023), and Letters on Sociology of Law (Peking University Press, 2024). He has also published many articles in leading law reviews and social science journals, including Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, Law & Policy, Asian Journal of Law and Society, Wisconsin Law Review, Fordham Law Review, Journal of Legal Education, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Sociological Theory, European Journal of Social Theory, Governance, China Quarterly, etc.

Curriculum vitae

University webpages:

HKU Faculty of Law

HKU Department of Sociology

Academic articles:

Google Scholar

Web of Science

Academia.edu

Books:

Amazon.com (English)

douban.com (Chinese)

Syllabi: