Academic Staff
Donald Lewis
Donald J Lewis was born in the United States, and educated in the United States and the United Kingdom. He obtained his AB in international relations from the University of Southern California, where he was a George Moore scholar, his JD from Emory University School of Law, and his LLM from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He is admitted to the State Bar of Georgia (1981). From 1994-96, Mr Lewis was a consultant with White & Case, Hong Kong. Before joining the Faculty, he was a Fulbright law professor at Zhongshan and Nankai Universities in the People's Republic of China (1984-86) and a research fellow at the East-West Center (1983-84).
He joined the Department of Law as a Lecturer in Law in 1986, and has been an Associate Professor since 1997. Since 1997, Mr Lewis has served as Convenor of the Chinese Law Research Group, and has organized and directed Chinese law postgraduate programmes in the Faculty. He is a Fellow of the HKU Institute for China and Global Development. He is also currently Acting Director of the Asian Institute of International Financial Law.
Mr Lewis' primary teaching and research interests are Chinese law, trade and investment law in the PRC, international trade law, and Asian law and development. His current research concerns issues of societal governance in China and China's WTO accession. He has lectured widely on Chinese law in Europe, North America and Asia. In 2000, he was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School, East Asian Legal Studies Program, while in 2001, he was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Zurich Faculty of Law. He has also acted as an expert witness on Chinese law to international law firms and multinational corporations with respect to litigation and arbitration in the United States, China, Australia, Hong Kong and South Africa. In addition to numerous articles and chapters on Chinese law, Mr Lewis is the general editor of China Investment Manual, 2nd Edition (1998), PRC Joint Ventures: Drafting and Negotiating Contracts (with co-author John Kuzmik) (1997), and general editor of The Life and Death of a Joint Venture in China (rev.ed.1996). Most recently, he published "Governance in China: The Present and Future Tense" in Brahm, L.J., ed., China's Century: The Awakening of the Next Economic Powerhouse (2001). He is also co-founder and academic consultant of the leading English periodical on recent Chinese legal developments, China Law & Practice. Mr Lewis speaks and reads Chinese.
Specialized Areas: Commercial Law, WTO and International Economic Law
