Professor Eva Pils

Biography

Eva Pils is Professor of Law at King's College London, an affiliated scholar at the US-Asia Law Institute of New York University Law School, and an external member of the Centre for Human Rights Erlangen-Nürnberg. She studied law, philosophy and sinology in Heidelberg, London and Beijing and holds a PhD in law from University College London. At King's, she teaches courses on human rights; law and society in China; and authoritarianism, populism and the law. Before joining King’s in 2014, Eva was an associate professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. She is a member of the Academic Freedom and Internationalisation Working Group and a legal action committee member of the Global Legal Action Network. 

Research interests

Professor Pils' scholarship addresses autocratic conceptions and practices of governance, legal and political resistance, and forms of complicity with autocratic wrongs. Her most recent book, Human rights in China: a social practice in the shadows of authoritarianism, was published in 2018. She has previously worked on human rights defence in a variety of contexts, including criminal justice, land and housing rights, freedom of expression and association, and wider issues of access to justice, with a focus on China. She has written on these topics in both academic publications and the popular press.

Current research projects

• Academic freedom, globalised scholarship and the rise of authoritarian China (co-PI with Prof. Dr. Katrin Kinzelbach, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

Selected publications

• Human rights in China: a social practice in the shadows of authoritarianism, Polity, Cambridge, October 2018.
• China’s Human Rights Lawyers: Advocacy and Resistance, Routledge, Abingdon, December 2014.

Teaching

• Authoritarianism, populism and the law
• Law and Society in China
• Human rights: international and transnational perspectives