Visiting Scholar Reflections: Dr Xin Dai

In this interview, Dr Xin Dai shares insights into international collaboration, her research, and her experience as a visiting scholar at Leeds.

About you

I am from Southwest University of Political Science and Law in Chongqing, China, where I am an Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Languages. My research and teaching are interdisciplinary, with a particular focus on criminal justice, judicial discourse, sentencing and legal language.

What attracted you to being a visiting scholar at the School of Law at the University of Leeds?

What attracted me most was the strong academic fit between Leeds and my research. The School of Law has an excellent international research profile and brings together legal, socio-legal and criminological research.

There was also a particularly good complementarity between my research and that of Professor José Pina-Sánchez, my academic host. His research approaches sentencing and criminal justice decision-making through quantitative and empirical methods, while I approach judicial decision-making from a discourse-analytic and linguistic perspective. I saw Leeds as an ideal place to bring these different perspectives together.

In addition, Leeds and my home university already have institutional links, which made the academic exchange particularly meaningful.

Which Research Centre were you affiliated with?

I was affiliated with the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies. CCJS was a particularly good fit because of its research on criminal justice and sentencing, with a strong empirical orientation

Have you collaborated with any School of Law academics while here?

I had particularly valuable academic exchanges with Professor Pina-Sánchez and Dr Matt Tidmarsh. I attended Professor Pina-Sánchez’s teaching sessions on quantitative methods and empirical approaches to criminal justice. The sessions covered regression modelling, causal analysis, time-series analysis, multilevel modelling and longitudinal approaches, with applications to sentencing data, sentencing guidelines and differences in sentencing practices across judges.

This helped me look at sentencing more comprehensively. My own research asks how judges construct and justify decisions through language, while the quantitative perspective encouraged me to consider the empirical patterns behind sentencing decisions, the factors associated with those patterns, and variations across judges, courts and time.

Have you taken part in any events while in Leeds?

Yes. I attended Dr Tidmarsh’s book launch on Probation Governance, Identity and Practice, and workshops organised by Leeds Social Research Methods on data visualisation and latent variable modelling. These activities exposed me to research methods and perspectives beyond my immediate research area, significantly broadening my methodological perspective and research horizons. They also encouraged me to consider new approaches that could inform my own research.

Did you have any research outputs during your time in Leeds?

Yes. My main research output has been the substantial completion of a monograph on reporting nouns in judicial judgments in England and Wales.

The book examines how judges use nouns such as argument, statement, proposition to organise different voices in judicial discourse. One of my key findings is that the same proposition can be repeatedly repackaged as different types of discourse entity as judicial reasoning develops. This is not simply lexical variation: each reporting noun gives the proposition a new discursive identity and argumentative function.

More broadly, I argue that judicial reasoning is a dynamic process of organising and reconstructing discourse entities, through which the judge gradually incorporates interpretation, evaluation and reasoning into what may seemingly be presented as another person’s viewpoint.

My time at Leeds has been particularly important in integrating my case-based analyses into an overall argument of the book. The monograph is now at the final stage of completion, and I am also developing parts of the research into journal articles.

What was a highlight of your time at Leeds?

One of the highlights of my time at Leeds has been the people and support I have received. Professor Pina-Sánchez has generously shared his expertise in research methods and sentencing, and has actively helped me become part of the research centre by introducing me to many of its members. Dr Qi Zhou helped me quickly get familiar with the School and its colleagues, and I particularly enjoyed a lovely chat with Dr Ci Ren at the School’s Christmas Get Together. Dr César Ramírez-Montes kindly shared his ideas on listening to audiobooks to develop more natural English. Beyond these colleagues, everyone I have met in the Law School has been welcoming and approachable, making me feel part of the School and making my experience at Leeds particularly rewarding.

What have you learnt during your time at Leeds that you will take back to your home institution?

The most important thing I will take back is a broader and more interdisciplinary way of looking at criminal justice research.

My own work is primarily discourse-analytic, but my experience at Leeds, particularly my interaction with Professor Pina-Sánchez and colleagues at CCJS, showed me how quantitative and qualitative approaches can complement each other. I now think not only about how sentencing decisions are justified through language, but also about the empirical patterns behind those decisions and the factors that may explain them.

I hope to bring this broader perspective back to my home institution, both in my research and teaching. So, what I am taking home is not simply a particular research technique, but a more open, interdisciplinary and empirically informed approach to studying criminal justice.

Further Information

Over the years, the partnership between the University of Leeds School of Law and Southwest University of Political Science and Law (SWUPL) has grown from strength to strength. Our collaboration now extends across both education and research. In addition to our transnational education partnership, which enables outstanding students from SWUPL to pursue their studies at Leeds, we have developed a strong tradition of academic exchange through the hosting of visiting scholars. More recently, our two institutions have established a joint research cluster in intellectual property and technology law, creating further opportunities for academic collaboration and intellectual exchange. We look forward to deepening this partnership and developing new forms of collaboration in both student education and research in the years ahead.

Learn more about our visiting scholar programme here.