Alvin is a Presidential Assistant Professor at the School of Law, City University of Hong Kong. His research explores how law adapts to technological and social change. Drawing on socio-legal and interdisciplinary perspectives, he is particularly interested in how legal ideas and practices evolve across different legal traditions in response to emerging forms of organisation. His current work focuses on artificial intelligence and distributed ledger technologies, while his broader research examines legal consciousness and property law in China and Southeast Asia.

Alvin’s work has appeared in leading journals including The Cambridge Law Journal, Big Data & Society, Asian Journal of Comparative Law, International Journal of Law in Context, Cornell International Law Journal, Chinese Journal of Comparative Law, Asian Journal of Law and Society, Work, Employment and Society, Law and Critique, Law, Culture and the Humanities, and Legal Ethics.

Alvin holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, an LLM from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an LLB from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was admitted as a solicitor of the High Court of Hong Kong in 2018.

Selected Publications

• “DAO as Rhizome: Reimagining Rules, Governance, and Organisations” (2026) 37 Law and Critique 203
• “Algorithmic Foreign Policy and Executive Agreements: Reassessing Legal Accountability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” (2025) 58(1) Cornell International Law Journal 37
• “The Roots of Private Property: Native Vegetation Laws and Murder in The Winter Road” Law, Culture and the Humanities (2025) (with Amelia Dale)
• “The Emergence of ‘Newcomer Injunctions’: Wolverhampton City Council v London Gypsies and Travellers” (2025) 84(1) Cambridge Law Journal 35
• “Legal Consciousness and the Crypto Phenomenon: Property Ideologies, Innovation, and Potential Ramifications on Financial System Stability” (2024) 20(4) International Journal of Law in Context 598
• “Evolution of Intangible Property to Crypto-Assets: Legal Pragmatism in Anglo-American Common Law and Chinese Civil Law” (2024) 12 Chinese Journal of Comparative Law
• “The Curious Case of Blockchain in Rural China: Unravelling Power, Profit, and Surveillance” (2024) 11(2) Big Data and Society
• “Cryptoasset Fraud: An Unknown Quantity?” (2024) 8082 New Law Journal 15
• “The Role of Boundary-Spanners in the Control of a Chinese Garment Factory in Myanmar” (2024) 38(5) Work, Employment and Society 1333
• ‘Reexamining the Integrative Approach to Legal Ethics Education: The Case of Hong Kong as an Asian Financial Centre’ (2023) 26 Legal Ethics 219
• “Filial Piety across Legal Systems: Analyzing the Influence of Traditional Chinese Legal Culture of Property in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China” (2023) 18(2) Asian Journal of Comparative Law 137
• “Examining the AI-Based Biometric Surveillance Data Collected by Employers: A Review Based on Federal and State Laws Protecting Employee Privacy Rights” (2023) 41 Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal 25
• “How has the Legal Consciousness of Chinese Enterprise Managers Transformed since 1949? A Study of Chinese Enterprises under Socialism” (2022) 9(2) Asian Journal of Law and Society 286

Book Chapters

• “Digital Assets from a Socio-Legal Perspective”, in Jason Grant Allen, Simon Gleeson and Peter Hunn (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Digital Assets and the Law (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
• “Blockchain and Humanity: Rethinking Techno-Libertarianism”, in John Flood and Lachlan Robb (eds.), Blockchain Handbook on Law and Society (De Gruyter, forthcoming)
• “Ethnography”, in Jan Smits and Nuno Garoupa (eds.), Handbook on Research Methods in Labour Law (Edward Elgar, 2024)

Work in Progress

• “Equity in a Trustless Market Order”
• “Algorithmic Authority in Global Value Chains”
• “Autonomous AI and the Limits of Mistake”