Sida Liu
Sida Liu is a sociologist of law specializing in the legal profession, law and globalization, sociolegal theory, and general social theory. He received his LL.B. degree from Peking University Law School and his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. Dr. Liu is Associate Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Toronto, Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, 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 Toronto faculty in 2016, Dr. Liu taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as Assistant Professor of Sociology and Law in 2009-2016 and directed its East Asian Legal Studies Center in 2014-2016.
Dr. 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. His most recent research project examines the influence of colonialism and authoritarianism on the professions in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Dr. Liu is the author of two books in Chinese: The Lost Polis: Transformation of the Legal Profession in Contemporary China (Peking University Press, 2008) and 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). His first English book (with Terence C. Halliday), Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016.