Born in the United States, he graduated with a JD from the New York University School of Law in 1992. He was in-country program director for NYU Law’s China Law Program from 1994 to 1997 in Beijing, where he was also a visiting professor at the Beijing University School of Law. From 1997 through 2000, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Columbia Law School’s Center for Chinese Legal Studies. He was appointed Himalayas Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professor in Comparative Constitutional Law at Qinghua University Law School in 2002; Fellow in Public Law at the Regulatory Institutions Network (RegNet) of the Australian National University in 2003; and held the Chair in Globalization and Governance at Sciences Po in Paris in 2008. Since 2008, he has been on the faculty of NUS.
His research interests are in comparative public law – in particular public law and constitutionalism as it manifests outside of the countries of the North Atlantic – and in ‘regulatory geography’, which explores (largely from a systems theory perspective) how different kinds of geographies – e.g., economic geographies, cultural geographies, epistemic geographies and political geographies – effect regulatory capacity and functionality. On-going projects include a monograph on regulatory geography; an edited volume (with Chantal Mak of the University of Amsterdam) on the public-law dimensions of contract law; and a textbook to be entitled Transnational Law: Texts and Materials (also with Chantal Mak and Mariana Prado of the University of Toronto Law Faculty)
Books
Book Chapters
Hualing Fu and Michael Dowdle, 'The Concept of Authoritarian Legality: the Chinese Case' in Chen Weitseng and Fu Hualing (eds), Authoritarian Legality in Asia: Formation, Development and Transition (Cambridge University Press 2020) 63
