Prof. Benjamin Chen

Prof. Benjamin Chen

Associate Professor
GALLANT HO OUTSTANDING YOUNG PROFESSOR

Director, Law and Technology Centre

Biography

Benjamin Minhao Chen is Gallant Ho Outstanding Young Professor and Associate Professor in Law at the University of Hong Kong where he directs the Centre for Law and Technology. He is also a Research Affiliate of the ETH Zürich Center for Law and Economics. His research lies at the intersection of public law and social science, drawing on philosophy, economics, and politics to ask empirical questions about legal phenomena.

Benjamin’s scholarship examines how legal institutions make decisions, justify authority, and adapt to social and technological change. His recent research focuses on artificial intelligence and the justice system — including machine adjudication, online courts, AI-generated legal advice, and human judgments of fairness and reasonableness. He writes as well on legal interpretation and regulatory decision-making, including cost-benefit analysis, fair notice, textualism, and linguistic canons. He also studies Chinese legal institutions, including guiding cases, judicial policymaking, and the role of legality in Chinese governance.

His publications have appeared in law reviews including the Georgia Law Review, Washington Law Review, Harvard International Law Journal, and Harvard Journal of Law & Technology and interdisciplinary outlets including the Artificial Intelligence and Law, Journal of Legal Analysis,  the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory and the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. His papers have been selected for the Stanford International Junior Faculty Forum and the Federalist Society Annual Faculty Conference Young Legal Scholars Paper Competition.

Benjamin serves as Section Editor of Artificial Intelligence and Law and Associate Editor of Data & Policy.

Before joining HKU, Benjamin was an Assistant Professor in Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, an Academic Fellow and Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia University, and a judicial law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He is admitted to practice law in California. He received his Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy and J.D., Order of the Coif, from the University of California, Berkeley. He also holds an M.A. in Philosophy from University College London, an M.S. in Applied Mathematics from École Polytechnique, and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Chicago, with a minor in Romance Languages and Literatures.