Research Overview
Matthew S. Erie (J.D., Ph.D.) is an Associate Professor, Member of the Law Faculty, and Associate Research Fellow of the Socio-Legal Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. Starting fall 2025, he will join American University Washington College of Law as a tenured Associate Professor of Law and Associate Member of the Oxford Law Faculty. Professor Erie is an interdisciplinary and comparativist scholar whose work is centrally focused on two broad questions. The first asks how domestic legal orders shape international and transnational ones and vice versa. This analysis highlights the roles of ideology and politics in such relationships. He has examined this question across several jurisprudential communities including diasporic Muslim minorities, Chinese law reformers, and American political partisans. The second question examines the position of law in global disorder and re-ordering. This inquiry pertains chiefly to the relationship between Anglo-American and Asian law. Uniting the two questions, his methods and theories draw from historical, ethnographic, and socio-legal sources.
His first book, China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law (Cambridge University Press, 2016), based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in northwest China, is the first ethnographic study of the relationship between sharia and state law in the PRC. At Oxford, he was the Principle Investigator of the six-year long “China, Law and Development” project, funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant, which comprised of an international and interdisciplinary research team that empirically examined Chinese parties’ approaches to questions of international law and challenging legal and regulatory systems in host states.
Several books and special issues have derived from the CLD project including A Casebook on Chinese Outbound Investment: Law, Policy, and Business (CUP 2025), Inter-Asian Law (co-edited with Ching-Fu Lin) (ASCL’s Studies in Comparative Law series with CUP forthcoming), and Chinese Developmentalism in Global Law and Economic Order (co-edited with Jacques deLisle and Jaclyn Neo) (CUP forthcoming). He is writing a monograph on the role of Chinese law in this period of global interregnum. He has organized and/or edited five special issues including “Global Labs of International Commercial Dispute Resolution,” co-organized with Pamela Bookman and edited by Anthea Roberts (AJIL Unbound 2021) and “China and the International Legal Order,” the first joint issue between Yale Journal of International Law and Harvard International Law Journal (2021). Additionally, his writings have appeared in such journals as Wisconsin Law Review, Alabama Law Review, American Journal of Comparative Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, Law and Social Inquiry, and American Ethnologist.
His teaching includes property, international business transactions, business organizations, international law, comparative law, and Chinese law among other subjects. In addition to the U.S. and U.K., he has taught law in China, Singapore, Pakistan, and Cambodia. In the U.S., he has taught or visited at NYU Law School, University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, and George Washington University Law School.
Professor Erie is committed to academic and public service. A Fellow of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program and a Wilson China Fellow, he engages with broader publics including journalists, think tanks, policy makers, and educators. As an Advisory Board Member of the International Law & Social Sciences Interest Group of the American Society of International Law, he promotes interdisciplinary approaches to international and comparative law. He volunteers with community outreach non-profits focused on depolarization.
He practiced law in the New York and Beijing offices of Paul Hastings LLP where he focused on corporate real estate transactions and white-collar investigations (e.g., FCPA). He holds degrees from Cornell University (Ph.D., Anthropology), University of Pennsylvania (J.D.), Tsinghua University Law School (LL.M.), and Dartmouth College (B.A).
Please contact him at matthew"dot"erie"at"law"dot"ox"dot"ac"dot"uk".
His first book, China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law (Cambridge University Press, 2016), based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in northwest China, is the first ethnographic study of the relationship between sharia and state law in the PRC. At Oxford, he was the Principle Investigator of the six-year long “China, Law and Development” project, funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant, which comprised of an international and interdisciplinary research team that empirically examined Chinese parties’ approaches to questions of international law and challenging legal and regulatory systems in host states.
Several books and special issues have derived from the CLD project including A Casebook on Chinese Outbound Investment: Law, Policy, and Business (CUP 2025), Inter-Asian Law (co-edited with Ching-Fu Lin) (ASCL’s Studies in Comparative Law series with CUP forthcoming), and Chinese Developmentalism in Global Law and Economic Order (co-edited with Jacques deLisle and Jaclyn Neo) (CUP forthcoming). He is writing a monograph on the role of Chinese law in this period of global interregnum. He has organized and/or edited five special issues including “Global Labs of International Commercial Dispute Resolution,” co-organized with Pamela Bookman and edited by Anthea Roberts (AJIL Unbound 2021) and “China and the International Legal Order,” the first joint issue between Yale Journal of International Law and Harvard International Law Journal (2021). Additionally, his writings have appeared in such journals as Wisconsin Law Review, Alabama Law Review, American Journal of Comparative Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, Law and Social Inquiry, and American Ethnologist.
His teaching includes property, international business transactions, business organizations, international law, comparative law, and Chinese law among other subjects. In addition to the U.S. and U.K., he has taught law in China, Singapore, Pakistan, and Cambodia. In the U.S., he has taught or visited at NYU Law School, University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, and George Washington University Law School.
Professor Erie is committed to academic and public service. A Fellow of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program and a Wilson China Fellow, he engages with broader publics including journalists, think tanks, policy makers, and educators. As an Advisory Board Member of the International Law & Social Sciences Interest Group of the American Society of International Law, he promotes interdisciplinary approaches to international and comparative law. He volunteers with community outreach non-profits focused on depolarization.
He practiced law in the New York and Beijing offices of Paul Hastings LLP where he focused on corporate real estate transactions and white-collar investigations (e.g., FCPA). He holds degrees from Cornell University (Ph.D., Anthropology), University of Pennsylvania (J.D.), Tsinghua University Law School (LL.M.), and Dartmouth College (B.A).
Please contact him at matthew"dot"erie"at"law"dot"ox"dot"ac"dot"uk".
