Announcing the Faculty’s first Associate Professor of Asian Laws

The Faculty is delighted to announce the appointment of the first Associate Professor of Asian Laws.  Dr Ngoc Son Bui will take up the Associate Professorship in July 2021 and will be a Fellow of St Hugh’s College.

Son Bui
Dr Bui is a graduate of Vietnam National University-Hanoi (LLB; LLM) and The University of Hong Kong (PhD). He was previously a research fellow at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies of the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law. He has also held visiting research positions at Harvard, Melbourne, and Tsinghua Law Schools.

Professor Tarun Khaitan, Vice Dean (Teaching and Recruitment), said  

Dr Bui’s arrival will enhance the Faculty’s expertise in several under-studied jurisdictions. In particular, his pioneering research on socialist constitutions significantly augments our position as a truly global law school. We are delighted to welcome him to Oxford. 

Dean of the Faculty, Professor Mindy Chen-Wishart, added

This is a landmark appointment. It is important that we are knowledgeable about the Laws of Asia where so much of humanity reside. With Dr Bui’s appointment, we have taken a significant step towards our strategic goal of adding Asian Law to our research and teaching range.

Dr Bui works on comparative and constitutional law in Asia with a focus on the socialist and Confucian culture-influenced jurisdictions. He is the author of Constitutional Change in the Contemporary Socialist World (Oxford University Press 2020) which explores constitutional change in five current socialist countries (China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam), and Confucian Constitutionalism in East Asia (Routledge 2016) which is based on his doctoral dissertation. In addition, he has published over 40 journal articles and book chapters on issues in Asian law, such as constitution-making, constitutional amendments, and law and development. His work engages with theoretical conversations in comparative constitutionalism and comparative law, and integrates insights from social sciences (particularly, political science and sociology) into legal studies.

He is currently working on a new monograph project, Legal Reform in the Contemporary Socialist World, which will explore how and why the legal systems of the five current socialist countries have changed over the last three decades.

He is co-editing four volumes on Asian Comparative Constitutional Law (to be published by Hart Publishing) which will respectively deal with constitution-making, amendments, structure, and rights in selective Asian jurisdictions.

He serves in the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Comparative Law and in the advisory board of the Indian Law Review.

We look forward to welcoming Dr Bui to the Faculty in time for the new academic year.