2013-2014 Residential Fellows
Yun-Ru Chen
Yun-Ru Chen
Yun-Ru Chen’s academic research focuses on the intersection of law, family, and East Asia studies in a global setting. Her dissertation, The Emergence of Family Law in Colonial Taiwan: A Genealogical Perspective, analyzes the genealogy of the dichotomous construction of family law and market law starting from early 19th century Germany, to late 19th century Japan, and all the way to early 20th century Taiwan. It examined various family law discourse of legal thinkers ranging from European legal advisors seeking to draft the Japanese codes, to German-trained Japanese jurists opposing French-inspired codes, to anti-colonial Taiwanese activist journalists resisting legal assimilation, all of whom worked within different legal regimes to formulate their own visions of family law. She argues that the distinctiveness of family law and universality of market law were interdependently related. Family law was designed to safeguard national culture, be it neo-traditionalist or progressive. In contrast, market law was formulated to promote commerce and trade on an international scale.
One of her next projects will focus on the modernization of Chinese family law and its relation to Chinese nationalism starting from the late 19th century. It will explore the series of debates revolving around the neo-Confucian family ideology, considered the essential core of Chinese culture, and its relationship with family law. She also has launched another research project on how 19th and 20th century Bostonian family corporations participated in the expansion of Euro-American law to Asia along with the growth of a global market for tea, silk, and opium, and on their encounters with the Chinese legal system.
Heidi Matthew
Heidi Matthew
Heidi Matthews is a doctoral (S.J.D.) candidate at Harvard Law School where her research focuses on the intersection of criminal law, the law of war, and human rights law. Her dissertation undertakes a political theory of modern international criminal law, with a view to understanding how the criminalization of political violence depoliticizes the subjects of international law. Heidi is a Fellow at the Film Study Center at Harvard University and a Byse Fellow at Harvard Law School. She has been a Graduate Fellow at the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, a Doctoral Fellow of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a John Peters Humphrey Fellow of the Canadian Council on International Law, and a Research Fellow at the Project on Justice, Welfare and Economics at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Heidi holds a B.A. from Mount Allison University, an LL.B.-B.C.L. from McGill University, and an LL.M. (waived) from Harvard Law School. She has worked at the Appeals Chamber of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the Office of the Prosecutor at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.
Zinaida Miller
Zinaida Miller
Zinaida Miller (United States) is a doctoral candidate in International Relations at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. She joins the IGLP again this year, after serving as a Residential Doctoral Fellow from 2012-14. Her work examines the law and policy of post-conflict reconstruction, focusing on the interplay between ideas and institutions in the fields of transitional justice, state- and peacebuilding, human rights, and humanitarian aid. Using Palestine and Rwanda as case studies, her dissertation maps the allocation of power and authority among national and international actors in the aftermath of conflict, the ways in which ideas about how to reconstruct states both influence and are altered by institutionalization on the ground, and the effects of post-conflict discourses on resistance and political struggle.
This work builds upon her previous studies of transitional justice, which examined the field’s systematic occlusion of economic inequality and structural violence. Her publications include Perils of Parity: Palestine’s Permanent Transition (Cornell International Law Journal, forthcoming 2014) and Effects of Invisibility: In Search of the ‘Economic’ in Transitional Justice (International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2008). She holds a B.A. from Brown University, a Masters in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.