Jiaqi Zhang

Profile

After getting my LLM degree from the University of Warwick, I went back to China and started an NGO to eliminate poverty in rural areas. I spent two years in two of the poorest villages in Sichuan province and Inner Mongolia. Our mission was to persuade local villagers to join the integrated villagers' cooperative organisation.

After that, I worked as a lawyer and worked part-time in the NGO. After establishing the organisations and handing them over to the local people and governments, we fulfilled the mission and ended the NGO.

Research interests

I am interested in jurisprudence, more specifically, the relationship between emotion, reason, and law.

In the course of my work, both in the NGO and as a lawyer, I found emotions have played an essential role in decision-making at an individual level. And in the most eye-catching political events in the past few years, we could see the influence of emotions, too. In the recent field of legal theories, scholars have tried to overturn the dichotomy of reason and emotion in law and find the proper role for emotions to play in laws. However, the answers to how to understand/form law without the dichotomy of reason and emotion are still not clear. That is why I am interested in emotions. I am studying emotion, reason, and law through the lens of agential realism. As a theory famous for questioning assumptive dichotomies, agential realism may provide an inspiring method to unpack the dichotomy of reason and emotion in law.

Qualifications

• LLB (Law), Southwest University of Political Science and Law
• LLM (Advanced Legal Studies), the University of Warwick
• Certificate of the Legal Profession Qualifications, PRC
• Lawyer's License, PRC

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Law and Social Justice