Research Overview
Matthew S. Erie (J.D., Ph.D.) is an Associate Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law and Associate Member of the Oxford Law Faculty. Before AUWCL, he taught at Oxford for ten years where he was an Associate Professor with tenure. Professor Erie is an interdisciplinary and comparativist scholar whose work is centrally focused on what could be loosely called "non-liberal law" – how it shapes domestic systems and international and transnational law and its relationships with liberal law, notions of authority, and capitalism. He has examined these questions across several jurisprudential communities including diasporic Muslim minorities, Chinese law reformers, and American political partisans. He is particularly interested in intersections (e.g., "conflict of laws" and "legal infrastructure"), the role of ideology, and the position of law in global disorder and re-ordering. Specific applications include international development, transnational business, property relations, and law and religion. Geographically, his work compares Anglo-American law and Asian law. Uniting these questions, his methods and theories draw from historical, ethnographic, and socio-legal sources. At AUWCL, he leads the "Future of International Development" Project, featuring a series of workshops with practitioners from across the world to generate a new agenda for international aid and development.
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” (CLD) 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 the Global Legal and Economic Order (co-edited with Jacques deLisle and Jaclyn Neo) (CUP forthcoming). He is writing a monograph on everyday encounters with Chinese nomos across the world. 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 merie"at"american"dot"edu".
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” (CLD) 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 the Global Legal and Economic Order (co-edited with Jacques deLisle and Jaclyn Neo) (CUP forthcoming). He is writing a monograph on everyday encounters with Chinese nomos across the world. 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 merie"at"american"dot"edu".
