Li Chen

Li CHEN is currently Associate Professor of History and Global Asia Studies and Law, and a cross-appointed faculty member in the Faculty of Law and the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal studies at the University of Toronto. He was also the founding President of the International Society for Chinese Law and History (2014-2017). He received a J.D. from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in Chinese History from Columbia University. His research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of law, culture, and politics in the context of late imperial and modern Chinese history and international history since the 16th century.

His first monograph, "Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes," received Honorable Mention for the 2017 Peter Gonville Stein Book Award of the American Society for Legal History, and won the 2018 Joseph Levenson Book Prize for (Pre-1900) China Studies from the Association for Asian Studies.

He has also published an edited book (with Madeleine Zelin), Chinese Law: Knowledge, Practice, and Transformation, 1530s-1950s in 2015 (Brill), and is currently finishing up his second monograph, funded by a SSHRC grant and tentatively entitled "Invisible Power, Legal Specialists, and Juridical Capital in Late Imperial China, 1611-1911."