Prof. Weilin Xiao 肖煒霖教授

Prof. Weilin Xiao 肖煒霖教授

Assistant Professor

LL.M., J.S.D. (Yale University)
LL.B., LL.M. (Peking University)

Biography

Weilin Xiao’s academic interests include family law, comparative law, and legal history, with a focus on the East Asian region. In 2021, Weilin’s paper, “Expansion and Restriction: A Comparative Study of Modernization of Family Laws in Japan and China,” was awarded the Colin B. Picker Graduate Prize by the American Society of Comparative Law.

His J.S.D. dissertation, currently undergoing revision for publication as a monograph, concerns the divergent approaches toward modernizing family laws in Japan and China. Through a comparative perspective, Weilin seeks to answer why Japan and China coordinated legal transplantation and their own customary family laws differently, and how such choices shaped the modernization of those countries in the twentieth century.

Weilin obtained his J.S.D. degree from Yale Law School in 2024, following his LL.M. degree earned in 2019. Weilin was a Yale Legal History Forum Fellow in 2023. During the 2022–2023 academic year, Weilin was a Yale Fox International Fellow at the School of Law, Waseda University. He spent the 2019–2020 academic year as a Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the University of Tokyo, under the International Dissertation Research Fellowship awarded by the Yale MacMillan Center. Prior to Yale, Weilin completed his LL.B. and first LL.M. degree at Peking University.