HKU Awards for Research Excellence 2023-24

Congratulations to all Faculty of Law colleagues who were recognised in HKU Awards for Research Excellence 2023-24:

Outstanding Researcher Award 2023-24
Thomas Cheng

Outstanding Young Researcher Award 2023-24
Zhuang Liu

University’s Research Output Prize 2023-24 (Faculty of Law)
'The Governance of Chinese Charitable Trusts'

By Hui Jing, published by Cambridge University Press in September 2023

More details of the HKU Awards for Research Excellence can be found here. 

Ryan Whalen awarded the 2024 Microsoft Research AI & Society Fellow (Copyright Protection for User Data in the Era of LLMs)

Congratulations to Ryan Whalen, who awarded the 2024 Microsoft Research AI & Society Fellow.

Background on the prize: The Microsoft Research AI & Society Fellows program supports interdisciplinary AI research in the context of societal impact. The program offers opportunities for fellows from fields beyond core computer sciences to join and support interdisciplinary research conversations with Microsoft Researchers. By facilitating these new collaborations, Microsoft aims to scale the impact of collective research efforts at the intersection of AI & Society. For more information on the award, click here.

Ying Zhu Awarded 3rd prize of the 9th Qian Duan-sheng Award for Legal Research Achievement

Congratulations to Ying Zhu (朱颖), whose article “Do clarified indirect expropriation clauses in international investment treaties preserve environmental regulatory space?” was awarded the 3rd prize of the 9th Qian Duan-sheng Award for Legal Research Achievement. The article was published in the HARVARD INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL, volume 60, issue 2, pp. 377-416, published in August 2019.

    Background on the prize: The biennial Qian Duan-sheng Award for Legal Research Achievement is a national award for legal research established by China University of Political Science and Law in memory of Dr. Qian Duan-sheng (1900-1990) for his remarkable contribution in advancing the law studies in China. The award was established in 2006 which aims to promote the development of law studies and the establishment of rule of law in China. The Award Committee is composed by leading Law experts in China. With significant global academic and social influences, the Qian Duan-sheng Award for Legal Research Achievement is one of the most important awards in Chinese law academia. For more information on the award, click here (in Chinese).

Douglas Arner on Digital Finance, Financial Inclusion and Sustainability: Building Better Financial Systems (RGC SFS)

Digital finance has accelerated its influence on financial systems in the wake of crises including the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical conflicts, climate change and market volatilities across the globe.

      Awardee of the 2020/21 Research Grants Council (RGC) Senior Research Fellow Scheme, Douglas Arner (Kerry Holdings Professor in Law at The University of Hong Kong) leads his team in the exploration on digitisation and its effects on finance and regulation through new technologies.

     In collaboration with the Alliance for Financial Inclusion and alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Group, the Senior Research Fellow Scheme project strategises to enable FinTech and RegTech solutions to build relationships between digital payments and financial inclusion. Watch this video to learn more about the project’s initiatives.

Daniel Matthews Awarded the 2021 Penny Pether Prize

Congratulations to our former colleague Dr Daniel Matthews whose recent book was awarded the 2021 Penny Pether Prize for Scholarship in Law, Literature and the Humanities. The monograph published by Edinburgh University Press is titled Earthbound: The Aesthetics of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene (EUP, 2021).The prize honours the late Penny Pether (1957-2013), an Australian scholar who "helped convene the first conference of teh Law and Literature Association and founded the interdisciplinary journal Law Text Culture". The prize is awarded by the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia to the author whose book has, in the judgement of the Committee, made the most significant contribution to the field of Australasian law, literature and humanities. Our colleague Professor Marco Wan was awardedthe 2017 Penny Pether Prize for his book Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction.

Award Winning Competition Law Scholarship by Dr Angela Zhang (2019)

Congratulations to Dr Angela Zhang for her outstanding success in this year's Antitrust Writing Awards 2019.  Two of her recent articles won an award and a third one was shortlisted.  She is the only person to win more than one award this year.

Winner (Procedure Category)  "Strategic Public Shaming: Evidence from Chinese Antitrust Investigations" (2019) 237 China Quarterly 174-195.  

Winner (Asian Antitrust)  "The Role of Media in Antitrust: Evidence from China" (2018) 41 Fordham International Law Journal 473-530. 

Shortlisted (Concerted Practices)  "Strategic Comity" (2019) 44 Yale Journal of International Law

    Dr Zhang was recently a panel speaker at the Hearings on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century organised by the United State's Federal Trade Commission from 25-26 March 2019 in Washington DC.  The 11th session was titled "The FTC's Role in a Changing World" and focused on the agency's international work.  It explored the FTC’s international role in light of globalization, technological change, and the increasing number of competition, consumer protection, and privacy laws and enforcement agencies around the world. Speakers addressed the implications of international developments on the FTC’s work on behalf of American consumers.  Dr Zhang spoke on a panel with three other professors including Francesca Bignami (George Washington University), Christopher Yoo (University of Pennsylvania) and Philip Masden (College of Europe). During the hearing, Dr Zhang referred to several of her articles on EU courts and judges and the institutional challenges in Chinese antitrust enforcement.

HKU Law Professor Albert Chen Receives the Li Buyun Law Award

HKU Legal Scholar Professor Albert Chen Hung-yee
receiving the Li Buyun Law Award in Guangdong

Hong Kong University Law Professor  Albert Chen Hung-yee won the "Li Buyun Law Award"

( 港大教授陳弘毅獲「李步雲法學獎」)
(translated into English)
Ta Kung Pao  
9 December 2018

[Ta Kung Pao News] Reporter Fang Junming reports from Guangzhou: The 6th "Li Buyun Law Award" award ceremony was held at Guangdong University of Finance and Economics on 8 December 2018.  Harvard University professor William P. Alford and Hong Kong University law professor Albert Chen Hung-yee won the award. This is the first time a Hong Kong legal scholar has won the award.

     The jury believed that William P. Alford and Albert Chen Hung-yee have contributed to the rule of law construction and played an important role in promoting the rule of law exchange between China and the world.  Albert Chen Hung-yee has been teaching at the Law School of the University of Hong Kong for a long time. His book Introduction to the Legal System of the People's Republic of China published in English in 1992 has become a textbook or reference book for the study of Chinese legal system in many English-speaking countries. He is also the Hong Kong scholar with the most contacts and exchanges between legal scholars in the two places. He has been to the Mainland for academic exchanges and speeches for nearly 30 years and has also invited mainland legal scholars for exchange in Hong Kong.

     Albert Chen Hung-yee said: "Prof. Li Buyun said in his interview that he has done two things in his life. One is to advocate the rule of law, and the other is to advocate the protection of human rights and set an example for my younger generation." During the award ceremony, Albert Chen Hung-yee was also appointed a visiting professor at Guangdong University of Finance and Economics along with nine other professors.

Embedded Courts Awarded 2018 Distinguished Book Award of the Asian Law & Society Association

Congratulations to Professor Frank He, whose co-authored book, Embedded Courts: Judicial Decision-Making in China (Cambridge University Press 2017) (with Kwai Hang Ng of University of California, San Diego) was awarded the 2018 Distinguished Book Award of the Asian Law & Society Association (ALSA).  The award will be presented at an award ceremony to be held during the ALSA Conference on 1 December 2018 at Bond University.

    Embedded Courts "offers a penetrating discussion of the operation of Chinese courts... [and] explains how Chinese judges rule and how the law is not the only script they follow - political, administrative, social and economic factors all influence verdicts" (CUP website).

     ALSA was established in 2015 with the aims of fostering scholarship and engaging the broader research community. It succeeds the East Asian Law and Society Collaborative Research Network (CRN 33) of the Law & Society Association as the regional body. Its executive office is housed at Waseda University, Japan. ALSA aims to develop the Asian law and society field into a vibrant and cohesive discipline. Its annual meeting provides a timely platform to define the field, advance theory, and cultivate empirical work and new scholarship.

     This year the selection committee consisted of Setsuo Miyazawa (Chair and Immediate Past President of ALSA), Nick Cheesman (Australian National University), Matthew Erie (University of Oxford), Eric Feldman (University of Pennsylvania) and Dimitri Vanoverbele (Catholic University of Leuven). The awards will be presented at the ALSA 2018 Conference, from 29 November to 1 December 2018, at Bond University in Australia.
     UPDATE (July 2019).  Embedded Courts was the Runner-Up Winner of the 2019 International Society of Public Law Book Prize (ICON-S).

Angela Zhang, Author of the Best Asian Antitrust Academic Article, 2018 Concurrence Antitrust Writing Awards

Congratulations to Angela Zhang whose article “The Antitrust Paradox of China, Inc.” has been recognised as the best academic article in Asian Antitrust in the 2018 Concurrence Antitrust Writing Awards.  These awards reward the best articles published in peer-reviewed journals in 2017.  The Antitrust Writing Awards aim to "promote competition scholarship and to contribute to competition advocacy".  Each year around 100 articles are selected by the Editorial Committee and the readers nominate 20 of these articles.  The Board finally elects 10 winning articles in 10 individual categories.  

     Dr Zhang's article (download here) was published in the New York University Journal of International Law and Politics (2017, Vol 50).  The abstract reads as follows:

Common ownership by the Chinese State caused a stir in Europe recently. During its review of a joint venture involving a Chinese nuclear power company, the European Commission (“Commission”) held that it would treat all Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the energy sector as a single entity. This decision carries significant legal and practical implications for both businesses and the regulator. It also contradicts the Commission’s previous approach to European SOEs. In this Article, I argue that the legal framework under the E.U. Merger Regulation (EUMR) is unsuited to deal with the anticompetitive effects of state ownership. While the delineation of the boundary of an undertaking is a prerequisite for merger review, ownership and control are not absolute. Importantly, the extent to which the coordination by the Chinese State has lessened competition is a quantitative question, rather than a qualitative one. Consequently, a bright-line approach to defining an undertaking is both over and under-inclusive. To address the European Union’s dilemma in handling Chinese SOEs, I propose that the Commission should view national security review as a complement to its merger review. The optimal regulatory response to Chinese acquisitions hinges not only on economics, but also, perhaps more importantly, on politics.

Marco Wan's Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction Awarded Two Book Prizes

Congratulations to Marco Wan whose book, Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction, published by Routledge in 2016, was awarded the 2017 Penny Pether Prize of the Law, Literature, and Humanities Association of Australasia. The citation for the book on the prize certificate reads as follows:

Marco Wan’s monograph, Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction, is an exemplary work of law and literature. In Wan’s layered reading of five obscenity trials in 19th-century England and France, this book realises some of the most vital aims of the field. Wan’s command of law, and of literature, enables him to appraise the reading practices and pretensions of each, and to illuminate the courtroom conversations that take place between them. Wan asks a question at the heart of law and literature, how does the law read not just the texts but the novels that come before it? He answers this question by attending not only to final judgment, but to an original archive of trial transcripts, prosecution and defence submissions and oral argument. Wan’s reading of law’s encounter with these novels as shaping and preserving hegemonic forms of masculinity deepens his argument and extends the already impressive reach of this book. This is an exceptionally meticulous and beautifully crafted text: alongside its contribution of the fields of law, literature and masculinity and gender studies, Wan prosecutes his case with clarity and authority, and with the pleasure of the reader in mind.

The prize is awarded by the Association to the author whose book has, in the judgment of the Committee, made the most significant contribution to the field of Australasian law, literature and humanities. The prize honours the late Penny Pether (1957-2013), an Australian scholar whose passionate life-long commitment to the field pervaded every aspect of her teaching, research, and academic work. She helped convene the first conference of the Association and founded the interdisciplinary journal Law Text Culture. 

     As further testament to the excellence of the work, Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction was awarded The University of Hong Kong's Research Output Prize 2016-17 in the Faculty of Law announced in January 2018.

Shitong Qiao Awarded the First Masahiko Aoki Award for Economics Paper

Congratulations to Shitong Qiao who was awarded the first Masahiko Aoki Award for Economics Paper for his book, Chinese Small Property: The Co-Evolution of the Law and Social Norms, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.

      The Masahiko Aoki Award for Economics Paper was established in honor of Professor Masahiko Aoki, Professor Emeritus of Stanford University, the famous economist, co-founder of Center for Industrial Development and Environmental Governance (CIDEG) at Tsinghua University and former former joint chairperson of CIDEG Academic Committee, with a view to excavate and encourage Chinese young scholars to conduct academic research concerning public policy and institutional construction, and promote academic research and concrete progress in China’s public governance area. The award is in the name of Prof. Masahiko Aoki to honor his hopes.  The focus is on economics and China’s reform and development.  The award recognises excellent research papers making academic contribution to comparative institutional analysis.  The first Award Ceremony was presented in Beijing on 16 December 2017.  News coverage of the award and ceremony can be found here: Tsinghua University, Nikkei, Sina, and Sohu.

Sir YK Pao Chair David Law Awarded Distinguished Paper Award for co-authored paper, "Constitutional Dissonance in China"

Congratulations to our Sir YK Pao Chair in Public Law, Professor David Law, and his co-author who will receive a Distinguished Paper Award from the East Asian Law and Society Section of The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) at the AALS Annual Meeting in January 2018.
     The award is for a piece entitled “Constitutional Dissonance in China” which Professor Law co-authored with Professor Wen-Chen Chang of National Taiwan University. The work explains why it is "highly beneficial for comparative constitutional scholars to study Chinese constitutionalism." The piece will be published as a book chapter in the forthcoming edited collection, Comparative Constitutional Theory (Edward Elgar 2018), edited by Gary Jacobsohn & Miguel Schor.  It can be downloaded from SSRN by clicking here.

     This year the AALS Section on East Asian Law and Society selected four papers to be honoured in the annual Call for Papers on Asian scholarship on law and society. The papers and awards will be presented at the AALS meeting in San Diego from 5-6 January 2018.  All papers receive offers of publication in the Asian Law Review (U Penn).  The selection committee members were Eric Feldman (Penn), Chulwoo Lee (Yonsei), Robert B Leflar (Arkansas, chair), Craig Martin (Washburn), and Teemu Ruskola (Emory). 

Thomas Cheng Receives Award for Antitrust Scholarship (American Antitrust Institute)

Congratulations to Thomas Cheng who has been awarded the Best Antitrust and Intellectual Property Article by the American Antitrust Institute for his sole authored article, "Antitrust Treatment of the No Challenge Clause" (2016) 5 N.Y.U.J. of Intell. Prop. & Ent. Law 437.  The article was selected by the committee for the 15th annual Jerry S Cohen Memorial Fund Writing Award for antitrust scholarship.  The committee considered over 150 antitrust articles and books published in 2016.  The Jerry S Cohen writing award was established in memory of a former law partner at the law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.  An award ceremony will be held at the American Antitrust Institute's annual conference on 21 June 2017 in Washington DC.  The article made a distinct contribution to antitrust literature by examining the harmful consequences of 'no challenge clauses' (clauses that prohibit patent licensees from challenging the validity of the licensed patent).  It was also shortlisted for the Antitrust Writing Awards 2017.

Cheng and Kwok on Joint Ventures as Facilitators of Collusion Across Markets (new article)

"A neglected theory of harm: joint ventures as facilitators of collusion across markets"
Thomas Cheng and Kelvin Kwok
Journal of Antitrust Enforcement
Oct 2016 (advance access)

Abstract: While there has been extensive discussion in the antitrust literature on the procompetitive and anticompetitive effects of joint ventures, there is a lack of systematic analysis on the potential of a joint venture to have collusive harm beyond its home market. This article aims to fill the gap in the literature by systematically accounting for the possible ways in which a joint venture can facilitate collusion by its members outside of the venture’s home market, namely: (i) as a punitive mechanism for the cartel; (ii) as a provider of an important input; and (iii) as a facilitator of information exchange. In addition to discussing these theories of harm, this article will attempt to offer some ways in which such anticompetitive concerns raised by joint ventures can be alleviated or addressed under US antitrust law, including ex ante behavioural remedies and ex post conduct enforcement. The proposals are intended to preserve the efficiency-enhancing potential of joint ventures by permitting them as long as their collusion facilitating potential can be reasonably contained.  This article was nominated and shortlisted for the Concurrences Antitrust Writing Awards 2017 (concerted practices category).

Thomas Cheng on Antitrust Treatment of No Challenge Clauses (new article)

"Antitrust Treatment of the No Challenge Clause"
Thomas Cheng
NYU Journal of Intellectual Property & Entertainment Law
2016, Vol. 5, Issue 2, pp. 437-512

Abstract: This Article examines a patent licensing practice that has hitherto escaped the attention of U.S. antitrust law: the no challenge clauses. Under these clauses, a patent licensee is prohibited from challenging the validity of the licensed patent. These clauses have so far only been examined under patent law in terms of enforceability. This oversight by antitrust law is unfortunate, as no challenge clauses can create consumer harm by protecting an otherwise invalid patent from challenges and artificially extending the exclusive period granted by the patent law. This means that consumers have to bear supra-competitive prices for longer than necessary. A number of factors are relevant to the analysis of the legality of no challenge clauses, such as market power, patent validity, and market structure at the licensee level. This Article proposes a framework based on the Rule of Reason that incorporates all of these relevant factors and structures them in a way that renders the framework easy to apply. Lastly, the Article rejects a number of justifications that have been offered to argue for the legality of these clauses across the board.  Click here to download the full article.  This article was nominated and shortlisted for the Concurrences Antitrust Writing Awards 2017 (intellectual property category).

Weixia Gu Awarded Top Prize in the 2015 Best Research Output Prize, China Society of Private International Law

Congratulations to Weixia Gu, whose article "15 Years of the Handover: The Rise, Discontent, and Positive Interaction of Cross-border Arbitration in Hong Kong and Mainland China" (full download available) was awarded the top prize (First Class Journal Article) in the 2015 Best Research Output Prize of the China Society of Private International Law (Society). The article was published in the University of Pennsylvania East Asia Law Review, volume 9, issue 1, pp. 42-98, published in April 2014. The research was an output of a General Research Fund project funded by the Research Grants Council. 

     Background on the prize: Every year, there are 10 research outputs in the area of private international law/conflict of laws in China and Greater China selected to be honoured by the Society as Best Research Output Prizes. The Prize Competition is organised by China Society of Private International Law Secretariat, and referees are leading experts in the field in China. Among the 10 outputs honoured, there are two honoured as “First Class”, three honoured as “Second Class”, and five honoured as “Third Class”. For the “First Class” Prizes, they are sub-divided as “Authored Book” (1 Prize) and “Journal Article” (1 Prize).  For more information on the award, click here (in Chinese).

Michael Davis Receives Merit Prize (Human Rights Press Award 2015)

Congratulations to Michael Davis who received this year's English Commentary Merit Award in the 19th Human Rights Press Awards organised by the Hong Kong Journalists Association.  The award was received for articles published in the South China Morning Post ("Broken Trust", 3 Sept 2014, and "Clear Distinction", 7 Nov 2014) concerning the Occupy movement and political reform.  These and other articles by Professor Davis can be found here on this blog.