Professor Jianlin Chen

Overview

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

Bilingual in English and Chinese, Jianlin publishes widely, with an award-winning monograph with Cambridge University Press, and articles 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) examined 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, administrative , culture wars, charity, tax), his underlying research agenda is to develop an overarching theoretical inquiry that 1) interrogates how different modalities of state action—law, regulation, taxation, state ownership, public contracting, and government speech—often exhibit convergent capacities and limits in pursuing public interest objectives; and 2) challenges the conventional tendency to treat these modalities as normatively and analytically distinct, and instead develops a more integrated framework for holistically evaluating state intervention.

Jianlin served as Associate Dean (International) from 2021 to 2025. In this role, he led the development and implementation of MLS’s post-pandemic global engagement strategy, which centered on strengthening the diversity and quality of its international student cohort through a carefully curated network of degree pathway partnerships with top law schools in Asia-Pacific and beyond. From 2023 to 2025, he successfully negotiated pathway agreements with forty (40) new institutions, across twenty (20) jurisdictions spanning all six (6) continents.

Jianlin teaches Economic Analysis of Law, Corporations Law, Commercial Law in Asia, Comparative Sexual Offences, Natural Resources Law in Asia and Legal Method. He also coordinates and conducts the Research Support Program and various research workshops for graduate researchers.