Biography

My main areas of academic interest are legal theory, constitutional theory, comparative constitutional law, and legal reforms in a post-authoritarian society.
My doctoral dissertation “Legal Boundaries and Constitutional Authorship: Dilemmas of Citizenship in the Age of Globalization” investigated how the boundary-crossing effects of globalization would impact on legal thinking in general and the idea of citizenship in particular. The thesis is that the possibilities and limits of the theoretical efforts to establish post-national paradigms of citizenship in the age of globalization must be examined in light of how the idea of constitutional authorship contributes to the construction of legal boundaries in which citizenship as the ideal of self-government is conceived.
My current primary focus is to explore how law and time are interrelated and its bearing on constitutionalism in light of recent developments of European constitutionalization and the so-called “war on terror.”
Before I went to Yale Law School where I obtained my LL.M. and J.S.D., I received my primary legal education and did my first graduate legal studies in Taiwan. I received my LL.B. and LL.M. from National Taiwan University where I completed the coursework and passed the comprehensive examination for a PhD in Law as well. In the academic year of 2006-07, I studied at Harvard Law School as a visiting researcher working on the project “The Boundedness of Citizenship in the Law and Its Erosion in the Global Age.”
In Fall 2005 and Fall 2006, I was an adjunct lecturer with the Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts-Boston, teaching “American Constitutional Law and Theory.” In addition to my legal studies and teaching, I law-clerked from 1997 to 1998 for Justice Dr. Tze-Chien Wang in Taiwan’s Constitutional Court, who is a renowned civil law scholar in Taiwan and China. My most recent publication “The Duality of Federalist Nation-Building: Two Strains of Chinese Immigration Cases Revisited” was to explore the role that the American post-Civil War nation-building played in the decisions of the Supreme Court in Chinese immigration cases. My publications in Taiwan theoretically reflected on the transplant of Western legal theories in light of how administrative reforms and constitutional changes related law to politics in Taiwan’s post-authoritarian transition.