Speaker Series: Ji Li
Immigrant lawyers represent a rapidly growing yet understudied segment of the U.S. legal profession. This article examines the career trajectories of Chinese immigrant lawyers, the largest ethnic subgroup within this population, through a dual institutional perspective that situates their professional experiences within both home-state and host-state institutional contexts. Applying the forms of capital framework, this study empirically analyzes how these lawyers navigate the devaluation of their human and cultural capital, limited access to social capital, and systemic biases within the American legal market. Despite these structural barriers, Chinese immigrant lawyers exercise considerable adaptive agency by specializing in China-related legal work, a strategy that enables them to reconfigure and mobilize their capital in ways that mitigate structural disadvantages. By shifting the analytical focus beyond a U.S.-centric lens, this study advances socio-legal scholarship by proposing a transnational approach that captures both institutional constraints and agentic responses shaping immigrant lawyers’ careers. More broadly, it contributes to ongoing debates on the legal profession, immigrant incorporation, and first-generation Asian American professionals, while extending the application of the forms of capital framework to transnational legal careers.
To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.
Professor Li joined UCI Law in July 2019 as the John S. and Marilyn Long Professor of U.S.-China Business and Law. Prior to this appointment, he was a Professor of Law and a Zhuang Zhou Scholar at Rutgers University, where he also served as a member of the Associate Faculty of the Division of Global Affairs.
Professor Li received his Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University and his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an Olin Fellow in Law, Economics, and Public Policy. After law school, he worked for several years at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York.
Professor Li’s teaching and scholarship cover a broad range of topics, including Chinese law and politics, international business transactions, contracts, comparative law, and empirical legal studies. He has published two books with Cambridge University Press: Negotiating Legality (2024) and Clash of Capitalisms (2018), both of which examine how Chinese multinational companies, including those owned by the Chinese state, adapt to U.S. legal and regulatory institutions. During the 2018-2019 academic year, Professor Li was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is currently working on two book projects that investigate the interactions between China and the international legal order, as well as the ways transnational legal actors are coping with the U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry.