Cornell Law School’s Clarke Program in East Asian Law & Culture provided an opportunity on October 21-22, 2025, for young scholars to present new research during a two-day workshop entitled “Empirical Legal Studies in the Sinophone Region.” The fifteen presenters, all untenured yet and specializing in quantitative analysis of law, hailed from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and were doing research at American and international universities.

“This is the first time I am presenting this paper and this opportunity is tremendously valuable,” said Xiaohong Yu of the Department of Political Science at Tsinghua University, who presented on “Episodic Disembedding: Parachute Lawyers and Local Justice in China,” a study of how outcomes in criminal defense cases are influenced by whether lawyers are local to the area or “parachute in” from another jurisdiction. Yu, like other presenters, received support and feedback from Cornell Law faculty and other researchers in attendance.

“The strength of Cornell’s empirical legal studies faculty, combined with the expertise of faculty across disciplines, provides an extraordinary opportunity for the next generation of scholars to think about their research in new ways,” says Yun-chien Chang, the Jack G. Clarke Professor in East Asian Law and director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture. “The audience asks thoughtful questions, pushes back against assumptions, and offers new ways to frame findings to make the research more relevant and impactful.”

Two years ago, Amy I-An Su, who received her Ph.D. in Psychology at Cornell this year and is now teaching in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Washington, Tacoma, had presented research at a Clarke Program workshop and found “the feedback was super-helpful.” That research was recently published, and she was back at this workshop to present additional research. “I hope you’ll help us finish our third paper,” she told the audience. Her presentation was “Killing the Oblivious: Analyzing Successful and Unsuccessful Incompetency-to-be-Executed Cases in the United States.” Her co-author of the paper, John H. Blume, Samuel S. Leibowitz Professor of Trial Techniques and Director of Cornell Death Penalty Project at Cornell, attended the presentation and engaged in the Q & A. Moderator Valerie Hans, Charles F. Richlin Professor of Law at Cornell, called the research “really important work.” Hans said forensic psychologists have devoted a lot of research to assessing competency to stand trial, but “until this project, we haven’t really found much systematic work on competency to be executed.”

Other research presented involved analysis of DUI cases in China, Taiwan’s citizen judge system, parole practices in China, legal changes in the criminalization of prostitution, judicial reasoning in copyright damage awards, and beyond.

The conference was cosponsored by Cornell’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, and the Taipei-based Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.

Click here to view the full size conference poster.