Professor of Law

Curriculum Vitae

Areas of Expertise
Contracts, Corporations, Chinese Economic and Business Law, Chinese Legal History, Legal Theory

Biography

Prior to joining Emory Law, Teemu Ruskola was professor of law at American University in Washington, D.C. He has been a visiting professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and at Cornell Law School. In 2011-2012, he will be a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

A graduate of Yale Law School, Professor Ruskola worked as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, in New York and Hong Kong. Thereafter, he continued his graduate studies in East Asian Studies at Stanford University, where his research focused on the history of commercial regulation in China.

Professor Ruskola's scholarship addresses questions of legal history and theory from multiple perspectives, comparative as well as international, frequently with China as a vantage point. His publications—appearing in the Michigan Law Review, the Stanford Law Review and the UCLA Law Review, among other places—have explored the intersection of corporate and family law in China, the history and politics of Euro-American conceptions of sovereignty in the Asia-Pacific, and China’s historic status as an international legal subject.

Professor Ruskola is the recipient of several national awards, including a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.; a Law and Public Affairs Fellowship at Princeton University; and a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship with the American Council of Learned Societies. He has taught and lectured widely on Chinese law, comparative law and international law in the United States as well as in Europe, Asia, South America and Australia.

Professor Ruskola is co-editor (with Ugo Mattei and Antonio Gidi) of Schlesinger’s Comparative Law (7th ed., Foundation Press). He currently is completing two new book projects. Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law is a study of “legal Orientalism” as a structure of knowledge for understanding Chinese law as well as a historical practice in the context of U.S. extraterritorial jurisdiction in China from 1844 to 1943. China, For Example: China and the Making of Modern International Law analyzes the history of the introduction of Western international law into China, and the implications of that process for the theory and politics of international law. Professor Ruskola also is co-editor (with David L. Eng and Shuang Shen) of a forthcoming special volume of the journal Social Text, titled “China and the Human,” an interdisciplinary examination of Chinese, Western and transnational conceptions of the human as a legal, political, ethical, medical and anthropological subject.

Professor Ruskola is an elected member of the International Academy of Comparative Law as well as a member of the Executive Editorial Board of the American Journal of Comparative Law.

Education: AB, Stanford University, 1990; Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies, Taipei, 1992; JD, Yale Law School, 1995; AM, Stanford University, 1999.