Liwen Lin

Professor Liwen Lin is an Associate Professor at the Allard School of Law. Her research and teaching interests include comparative corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, state capitalism, Chinese law, and law and economic sociology.

She has written extensively on various legal innovations of corporate social responsibility (CSR), including codes of vendor conduct in global supply chains, sustainability reporting, and mandatory CSR legislation around the world. She also focuses on the governance of China’s state-owned enterprises in respect of their ownership structure, personnel management and executive compensation. She is currently working on a series of projects about the legal institutions of startup ecosystems worldwide.

Professor Lin’s research work has been published in a wide range of law and interdisciplinary journals, including American Journal of Comparative Law, the China Quarterly, Stanford Law Review, the World Trade Review, Columbia Business Law Review, Berkeley Journal of International Law, University of Pennsylvania Asian Law Review, etc.

Her research has been profiled in The Economist and the Wall Street Journal. She has been an invited guest speaker in news media such as Radio Free Asia. She is an invited researcher at CRETA of National Taiwan University. Prior to entering academia, Professor Lin was a consultant at a Forbes Global 2000 company.

Professor Lin holds LLM and JSD degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a PhD degree in Sociology from Columbia University, where she was appointed as a Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow.

Research and Publications

 To learn more about my research, please visit my PURE Research profile. You can also access my publications on the following sites: 

• Allard Research Commons / bepress Legal Repository Search (Open source publications only) 
• Allard Research Portal (Comprehensive list of publications)
• SSRN (Social Science Research Network)
• HeinOnline

• Business Organizations
• Law and Empirical Evidence
• LLM Seminar
• Comparative Corporate Governance

• “The ‘Good Corporate Citizen’ Beyond BCE” Alberta Law Review (forthcoming 2021)
• “Mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility? Legislative Innovation and Judicial Application in China” American Journal of Comparative Law (forthcoming 2020)
• “Replicating Silicon Valley? Law and Human Capital in the Making of China’s Tech Startups” Asian Journal of Comparative Law (forthcoming 2020)
• “Say on Purpose: Lessons from Chinese Corporate Charters” 9 Journal of Corporate Law Studies 251 (2019)
• “Reforming China’s State-Owned Enterprises: From Structure to People” 229 The China Quarterly 107 (2017)
• “Bonded to the State: A Network Perspective on China’s Corporate Debt Market” 3 Journal of Financial Regulation 1 (2017) (with Curtis J. Milhaupt)
• “Behind the Numbers:  State Capitalism and Executive Compensation in China” 12 University of Pennsylvania Asian Law Review 140 (2016)
• “State Ownership and Corporate Governance: An Executive Career Approach” 2013 Columbia Business Law Review 743 (2013)
• “We are the (National) Champions: Understanding the Mechanisms of State Capitalism in China” 65 Stanford Law Review 697 (2013) (with Curtis J. Milhaupt)
• “Corporate Social Responsibility in China: Window Dressing or Structural Change?” 28 Berkeley Journal of International Law 64 (2010)
• “Legal Transplants through Private Contracting: Codes of Vendor Conduct in Global Supply Chains as an Example” 57 American Journal of Comparative Law 711 (2009)

View Professor Lin's publications listed on the Allard Research Portal.

View Professor Lin's publications listed on SSRN.