Research
Pillar 1: Legal and Economic Organizations of Global Supply Chains
Pillar 2: Middle Powers’ Uses and Visions of International Law
My research agenda develops along three mutually reinforcing pillars.
The first and primary pillar examines how firms in global supply chains navigate and shape law through their corporate form, contractual practices, and economic arrangements.
The second pillar examines how middle powers in Asia and elsewhere use economic institutions and international law to maintain stability and assert agency amid great power competition.
The third, grounded in my long-running commitment to comparative law in Asia, explores how business governance frameworks are co-produced by state and societal actors and how global models adapt to local settings.
All three share a common sensibility: I combine expertise across fields, from corporate law to global supply chain regulation to new security thinking, among others, to open fresh pathways for research. Methodologically, I pair doctrinal analysis with political-economy and institutional insight, drawing on primary materials including corporate documents, legislative and regulatory sources, and multilingual research.
Full research agenda is available upon request.
Pillar 3: Comparative Business Law in Asia
Works in Progress
Regional Heterodoxy: Industrial Policy Coordination in Asia (draft in progress)
Legal Hedging: Power Acceptance and Rejection by Peripheral States (under peer review for the European Journal of International Law–Journal of International Economic Law Joint Symposium on “Great Power Competition & International Law”)
Economic Integration and Trade Law in Asia: Theories, Models, and Ambitions,in Oxford Handbook on International Trade Law in Asia (Julien Chaisse, Georgios Dimitropoulos, Han-Wei Liu & Intan Murnira Ramli eds., forthcoming Oxford University Press) (invited)
International Law in Party Prose: A Corpus Study of Vietnam’s Party Congress Documents (1986–2025) (under peer review at the Leiden Journal of International Law for the SMU-Georgetown symposium on the Study and Analysis of International Law Scholarship) (invited)
Selected Publications
Journal Articles
Goods’ Nationalities, 99 Southern California Law Review (forthcoming 2026) (57 pages)
Alternate Prisms of Product Nationality, 26 Theoretical Inquiries in Law (forthcoming 2026) (invited contribution for the Laws of Global Value Chains symposium) (31 pages)
From Product Nationality to Corporate Identity, 49 Seattle University Law Review 491 (2026) (invited contribution for the Berle XVII Corporate Law symposium) (24 pages)
Global Company Towns, 96 University of Colorado Law Review 75 (2025) (featured on the Business Scholarship Podcast) (55 pages)
Hidden Power in Global Supply Chains, 64 Harvard International Law Journal 35 (2023) (ComplianceNet Outstanding Junior Scholar Paper Award) (50 pages)
International Law as Hedging: Perspectives from Secondary Authoritarian States, 114 American Journal of International Law Unbound 237 (2020) (invited symposium contribution) (5 pages)
Co-Constructing Business Governance, 31 Stanford Law & Policy Review 143 (2020) (featured on the Oxford Business Law Blog) (44 pages)
In Search of Judicial Legitimacy: Criminal Sentencing in Vietnamese Courts, 32 Harvard Human Rights Journal 147 (2019) (42 pages)
Grading Regulators: The Impact of Global and Local Indicators on Vietnam’s Business Governance, 88 New York University Law Review 2254 (2013) (32 pages)
Book Chapters
Inter-Asia’s Company Towns, in Inter-Asian Law (Matthew Erie & Ching-Fu Lin eds., Cambridge University Press 2025) (invited) (17 pages)
Vietnam’s Responses to COVID-19: Local Governance and Bureaucratic Coordination, in International Comparative Analysis of Early COVID-19 Responses (Dong-Young Kim & M. Jae Moon eds., Taylor & Francis 2024) (invited) (12 pages)
State-Owned Enterprises in Vietnam’s 2013 Constitution, in Asian Comparative Constitutional Law, Volume I: Constitution-Making (Bui Ngoc Son & Mara Malagodi eds., Hart Publishing 2023) (invited) (13 pages)
From Revolutions to COVID-19: Policing Narratives in Vietnam, in Authoritarian Police and Legality in Asia (Fu Hualing & Chen Weitseng eds., Cambridge University Press 2023) (invited) (20 pages)
Selected Presentations
Harvard Law School
Stanford Law School
University of Pennsylvania School of Law, Center for the Study of Contemporary China
New York University School of Law, U.S. Asia Law Institute
University of Chicago School of Law
University of Michigan School of Law
Georgetown University Law Center
Duke Law School
National University of Singapore Faculty of Law
University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
Singapore Management University Yong Pung How School of Law
European Journal of International Law–Journal of International Economic Law Joint Symposium
American Society of International Law Annual Meeting Panel & Legal Theory Forum
(1) Presenting at the Asian Law Institute at National University of Singapore (2019), (2) Presenting at Harvard Law, with thanks to Professor Bill Alford for the invitation (2022), (3) Presenting at University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, with thanks to Dean Fu Hualing and Associate Dean Liu Sida for the invitation (2024)