Ching-Fang Hsu
Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto
Associate Professor of Public Policy and Administration at National Chi Nan University in Taiwan
Ching-fang Hsu is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Administration at National Chi Nan University in Taiwan. Her research focuses on the legal profession, with a particular focus on how legal actors and institutions operate under varying configurations of political power. Her recent work examines gender and judicial authority in the Taiwanese judiciary, the cross-border influence of Chinese capital on the legal profession, and the legal complex’s internal political dynamics during and after democratization.
She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, an LL.M. from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and an LL.B. from National Taiwan University. Before joining National Chi Nan University, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences in Taiwan, and was the Chiu Research Fellow at Oregon State University. She has also spent research stays at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the National University of Singapore, and the University of Hong Kong.
As Taiwan’s semiconductor industry has become indispensable to the global technology supply chain, its intellectual property has become the core strategic asset — and its legal guardianship a matter of national security and geopolitical significance. Dr. Hsu’s current project traces the rise of in-house legal counsel in this industry, examining how they have moved from a peripheral support function to the frontline defenders of the technology at the core of Taiwan’s economic power.
Dr. Hsu publishes across both law and social science journals, including the Cornell International Law Journal, Journal of Law & Society, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Law & Policy, Asian Journal of Law and Society, and UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal, among others. Her article in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (with Yun-chien Chang and Ivan Kan-Hsueh Chiang) received the Distinguished Article Award (2025) from the Asian Law and Society Association, and her earlier article in the Asian Journal of Law and Society received the Best Graduate Student Article Award (2018) from the same association. Her scholarship also appears in edited volumes published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Hart Publishing, and Edward Elgar Publishing.
Beyond her academic work, Professor Hsu writes creative prose, commentary, and literary reviews in Chinese. She is the author of three essay collections, Women in Taipei, Willing to Blossom, and Living the Pandemic. Her commentary and reviews have appeared in outlets such as The Reporter, Initium Media, OKAPI, OpenBook, The News Lens, and Crown Magazine.