Weilin Xiao

Weilin Xiao is a J.S.D. candidate at Yale Law School, where he earned his LL.M. degree in 2019. Prior to coming to Yale, Weilin completed his LL.B. and first LL.M. degree at Peking University. He spent the 2019-2020 academic year as a Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the University of Tokyo, under the International Dissertation Research Fellowship awarded by the Yale MacMillan Center. In 2021, Weilin was awarded Colin B. Picker Graduate Prize by the American Society of Comparative Law for his research paper on family law legislation in Japan and China. Weilin’s academic interests include family law and property, with a focus on comparative and sociological approaches. His J.S.D. dissertation concerns the divergent paths toward modernizing family laws in Japan and China. Through a comparative perspective, Weilin seeks to answer why Japan and China coordinated legal transplantation and their own customary family laws differently, and how such choices shaped the modernization of those countries in the twentieth century.