Gallant Ho Outstanding Young Professorship

The Faculty of Law at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) is the oldest in Hong Kong and is widely regarded as the city’s pre-eminent law school and among the best in Asia. Law was first taught at HKU in the 1920s and 1930s as part of a broad-based Arts curriculum. From 1964 to 1969, the Department of Extra-Mural Studies offered part-time courses leading to an external LLB degree from the University of London. The Faculty of Law traces its origins to 1969, when a Department of Law was established within the Faculty of Social Sciences.

The Faculty is renowned as a breeding ground for legal talent. It innovates in education, providing diverse learning opportunities to students through experiential learning programmes, China experiences, and international exchanges. The Faculty has nurtured numerous leading figures in public service and private practice, and many judges, legislators, and senior counsels in Hong Kong rank among its graduates. 

Professor Benjamin Chen is the Gallant Ho Outstanding Young Professor at the Faculty of Law, HKU. He is an interdisciplinary legal researcher interested in consequentialist reasoning in law, the diffusion of policy through the courts, and the impact of artificial intelligence on justice and its administration. He graduated with a JD, Order of the Coif, from the University of California, Berkeley, where he also received his PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. Before joining HKU, he was an Assistant Professor in public policy at the National University of Singapore. He was previously a postdoctoral research scholar and lecturer-in-law at Columbia University and served as a judicial law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He is currently also a research affiliate of the ETH Zürich Center for Law & Economics.

A major theme of Professor Chen’s work revolves around the optimality of legal procedure. These procedures are the formal rules that govern how disputes are resolved in courts and how government bodies make decisions. For example, administrative agencies in the United States are required to perform a cost-benefit analysis when making significant rules. Procedures are burdensome in terms of time and cost. They can however improve the quality of judicial or regulatory decision-making. They can also convince those impacted by a decision to accept it. His research investigates procedures from an empirical perspective to find out if they improve substantive outcomes, and whether they enhance positive legitimacy. Although some procedures may be seen as natural, they are all the product of human design. An understanding of how procedures function both in theory and in practice can prompt us to rethink the formalities inherited from past ages and to reimagine decisional frameworks in an era of technological innovation.

Professor Chen has been published in law journals such as the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, and in social science journals including the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. His articles have also been cited in legal textbooks, presented in professional courses and seminars, and referenced in the United States’ Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary.