Professor Jianlin Chen

Overview

Jianlin grew up in Singapore and Taiwan. He obtained his LLB from National University of Singapore, and his LLM and JSD from the University of Chicago. He is qualified to practice in Singapore and New York. He joined the Melbourne Law School in 2017 after starting his academic career at the University of Hong Kong in 2011.

Bilingual in English and Chinese, Jianlin publishes widely, with a monograph from Cambridge University Press, and in law journals such as Sydney Law Review, Law & Social Inquiry, Columbia Journal of Asian Law, 公司法评论, 北大法律评论. His current primary research interests are law & religion and criminal law, with a particular focus on fraud (e.g., religious fraud regulation, fraudulent sex criminalization) and through a combination of comparative perspectives and economic analysis.

Together with other research projects that traverse diverse subject matters (e.g., natural resources, property, corporate & securities, government procurement, culture war, charity, tax), his underlying research agenda is to develop an overarching theoretical inquiry that 1) explores how the different forms of state actions—ranging from law, regulation, tax, state ownership, public contract, government speech—have surprisingly similar capacity and propensity (or the lack thereof) to achieve public interest objectives; and 2) critically evaluates the prevailing approach of prescribing distinct legal constraints and normative considerations for each category of state actions.

Jianlin teaches Economic Analysis of Law, Corporations Law, Commercial Law in Asia, Comparative Sexual Offences, and Natural Resources Law in Asia.