Sida Liu is a Faculty Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a sociologist of law specializing in the legal profession, law and globalization, sociolegal theory, and general social theory. Liu is Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Hong Kong; Associate 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 a 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, 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. His most recent research project examines the influence of colonialism and authoritarianism on the professions in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He 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, Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016.
