CLA Academics Speaker Series: Professor Mark Jia

Harvard Law School China Law Association (CLA) is excited to host Professor Mark Jia (J.D. ’16) of Georgetown University Law Center, for a discussion of his upcoming paper, “Law Power.”

Professor Jia is a scholar of comparative and transnational law, with particular focus on the United States and China. His research broadly seeks to understand the relationship between law and authoritarianism and between law and geopolitics. His work has won the 2022 Mark Tushnet Prize from the Association of American Law School’s Section on Comparative Law, the 2024 Scholarship Prize from the American Society of International Law’s International Law and Technology Interest Group, and the 2025 Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award from the Future of Privacy Forum.

A brief introduction of “Law Power,” which Professor Jia will be discussing with attendees, is attached below. If you are interested in attending the event, please RSVP. The Zoom link and draft paper will be circulated to those who RSVP by Tuesday April 14.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to Shengdong Guo (sguo@sjd.law.harvard.edu), or Zeqing Li (zli@jd27.law.harvard.edu).

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“Law Power”

International relations scholars have long debated the military, economic, and cultural dimensions of national power. Yet in new age of great power competition, we lack a general theory of national legal power comparable to these more familiar forms of national power. Drawing on legal scholarship across many specific settings, this Article introduces a general concept of law power—a nation-state’s ability to use law to affect others to get what it wants. Law power can be soft, hard, or sharp, and can involve local, foreign, or international law. In today’s juridified geopolitics, law power is a leading form of national power.

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