Speaker: Michelle Miao, Associate Professor of Law, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Social media function not merely as communication conduits but as active agents shaping public discourses central to judicial matters and political life. This talk examines how public discussions of high-profile capital homicide cases are transmitted through social media algorithms. Drawing on mediated populism and theories of political communication, it analyses media data to explore the intersection of platform governance, state communication strategies, and popular engagement with criminal justice. Employing content analysis and quantitative metrics , the study contributes to scholarship on judicial politics and the evolving landscape of comparative law in the social media age.

Professor Michelle Miao is an Associate Professor of law from the Faculty of Law, Chinese University of Hong Kong. She holds a DPhil degree in law from the University of Oxford and two LLM degrees from New York University and Renmin University of China respectively. She previously conducted research in the capacity of New York University’s Global Fellow (2014-5) , University of Oxford’s Howard League Fellow (2013-4) and British Academy’s prestigious Postdoc Research Fellow (2015-6), National University of Singapore’s ASLI visiting scholar (2019) and recently Harvard Yenching Scholar (2019-20).

Among Professor Miao’s research interests are the intersections between law and technology, criminal justice, socio-legal studies and comparative law. She published with reputable international journals such as American Journal of Comparative Law, International Comparative Law Quarterly and British Journal of Criminology. She presented her work at Asian Law Institute’s Junior Faculty Forum (2021), Chicago-Tsinghua Junior Faculty Forum (2019), and Stanford International Junior Faculty Forum (IJFF) (2015). Her scholarship and commentaries have been featured in various international media outlets, including The Guardian, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, South China Morning Post, and The Globe and Mail.

Professor Miao is an awardee of the American Society of Comparative Law’s Hessel Yntema Prize (2020) for the most outstanding scholarship by a scholar under 40 years of age. She is also a recipient of CUHK Law’s Academic Impact in Legal Scholarship (2021), Asian Law Institute’s Junior Faculty Award for Best Paper (2020), Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Young Researcher Award (2019), and Chinese University Faculty Teaching Excellence Awards (Hong Kong, 2019).

A light lunch will be provided. Please register here.

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