Sida Liu (he/him) is a Faculty Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a sociologist of law specializing in the legal profession, law and globalization, criminal justice, and sociolegal theory. Liu is Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Hong Kong; Professor of Sociology, Law, and Global Affairs at the University of Toronto; Vice President of the China Institute for Socio-Legal Studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 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. In 2016-2017, he was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Before joining the University of Hong Kong faculty in 2022 and the University of Toronto faculty in 2016, Liu taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as Assistant Professor of Sociology and Law and directed its East Asian Legal Studies Center from 2014 to 2016.
Liu has conducted extensive empirical research on China’s legal reform and legal profession and published many articles in leading law and social science journals in both English and Chinese. He has also written widely on sociolegal theory and general social theory. He is the author of four books: 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 (first edition, Shanghai Joint Publishing Co., 2011; revised edition, Yilin Press, 2017), Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work (with Terence C. Halliday, Cambridge University Press, 2016), and The Asian Law & Society Reader (with Lynette J. Chua and David M. Engel, Cambridge University Press, 2023).
