Mok Sau-King Professorship in Law

Chinese law has developed rapidly over the last four decades and the Faculty of Law at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) is uniquely positioned for studying its development. The Faculty is considered to have the widest range of expertise in Chinese Law outside of Mainland China.

Professor He Xin is the Mok Sau-King Professor in Law at HKU. Professor He spearheads the study of China's legal systems through a law and society approach. His research focuses on courts, but he also covers constitutional theory, administrative law, contract enforcement, criminal justice, tort law and family law. Using Chinese data and experiences, Professor He explores areas like judicial behaviour, law and social movements, dispute resolution, gender studies, procedural justice and legal consciousness.

Professor He obtained his LLB and LLM from Peking University and his JSM and JSD degrees from Stanford University, where he was an Asia-Pacific Scholar. Before joining HKU, he was Professor and Director of the Centre for Chinese and Comparative Law at City University of Hong Kong where he worked for 15 years.

He has won numerous honours and awards including being appointed three times as Global Faculty at New York University’s School of Law, a runner-up book prize for the International Society of Public Law in 2019, the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship from the Hong Kong Government in 2019, and the Distinguished Book Award, Asian Law and Society Association, in 2018.

His monograph Embedded Courts: Judicial Decision Making in China with Kwai Hang Ng (Cambridge University Press 2017) won multiple awards. Other monographs include Divorce in China: Institutional Constraints and Gendered Outcomes (NYU Press 2021) and The Judicial System of China (Oxford University Press 2024) which will be published in December.

Professor He’s articles appeared in the most prestigious and selective journals of the field such as American Journal of Sociology, Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, China Quarterly, China Journal, International Journal of Constitutional Law, and American Journal of Comparative Law.

He served as the co-editor in chief for Asia Pacific Law Review, Associate Editor for China Law and Society Review, the member of the editorial board for Law & Social Inquiry, Chinese Journal of Comparative Law, and Asian Journal of Law and Society.

He has been frequently invited to give talks at the most prestigious institutions in the world, including Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, Cambridge and Oxford.

Professor He is one of the most cited China law scholars in the English world and his work has been quoted by the Supreme Court of New Zealand.