Law, Environment and Development Centre

Dr Chung-Hsien Lee

Key information

Roles
Law, Environment and Development Centre Member
Qualifications
BA (National Taiwan University) LLM (National Taiwan University), PhD (SOAS University of London)

Biography

Chung-Hsien Lee is a lawyer and postdoctoral researcher at Academia Sinica. He currently works on law and policy issues regarding ‘legislative impact assessment based on sustainable development’ and 'climate litigation as the approach to the fulfilment of NDCs under Paris agreement'. His doctoral thesis is on the legal implication of sustainable development in the context of climate change governance with a special focus on market-based mechanism.

His research scope encompasses numerous cross-boundary issues, including climate change mitigation and ecosystems law, new energy reform, regulatory initiative on plastic products and fossil fuel, innovation in geoengineering and green technology, promotion of circular economy and global/ regional carbon market. The intertwined rationales, concerns, and interests behind these complex problems drive researchers to go beyond the border of law, at the very least the boundary between civil law and common law, public/ private law and international/ municipal law. As such, comparative approaches based on colonial and legal transplant studies, regional studies, and legal anthropology is of interest to him.  Chung-Hsien also dabbles in cross-sectoral approaches such as social legal study, law and STS, transnational governance and international law, law and sustainable development & political ecology, law as communication, law as autopoietic system, etc. 

Chung-Hsien has presented papers in several international conferences including in 13th Annual Conference of the European Association of Taiwan Studies 2016 reporting ‘The intertwined climate politics and climate governance - observing from the Taiwan’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction and Management Act’; the 13th Cornell Law School Inter-University Graduate Conference 2017 on the theme ‘From fragmentation to integration: observing from the case of sustainable development as legal principle’; special Workshop IVR 2017 on ‘Bringing sustainable development from ethic and policy guidance to legal norms’. In 2019, he was invited to speak at NTU Law School on ‘Sustainable development as legal framework for global climate governance’.

Research interests

Environmental and ecosystems law; Climate change and energy law; Sustainable development; Sustainability and risk assessment; International and transnational law; Law and governance; Social legal study; Comparative law; Critical legal theories; Legal transplant; Study of colonialism and empire.

Contact Hsien-Chung