BSE in Computer Science, University of Michigan, 2010
BSE in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2011
Juris Doctor, Washington University in Saint Louis, 2014
Haozhou is a PhD candidate at KoGuan Law School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University under the supervision of Professor JI Weidong. His broad intellectual interest include political theory, empirical sociology and philosophy of science. Haozhou’s PhD thesis is an empirical research in China’s judicial decision-making in the area of environmental litigations.
Striving to understand how “performance legitimacy” of China’s political system affects its judicial decision-making, Haozhou studies a pilot environmental court in Southwest China. Employing ethnographic and archival methods, he shows how a strong sense of instrumentalism pervaded most torts cases the pilot court decided from 2007 to 2017. Examining judicial behavior along both ideational and institutional latitudes, Haozhou portrays local judges as both legal professionals and party-state officials. By capturing the motivations behind their judicial decisions, he also demonstrates that instrumentalism metamorphoses into opportunism as judges respond to the incentive structure provided by the judicial apparatus.
Haozhou is licensed to practice law in the state of New York. He is also the managing editor of Asian Journal of Law and Society, the first English journal in the region and field.