Professor Eva Pils

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 has taught public law on the LL.B. program and courses on human rights; law and society in China; and authoritarianism, populism and the law on the LLM programme. Before joining King’s in 2014, Eva was an associate professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law.

Research interests

• Human rights
• Rule of law
• Law and society in China

Professor Pils' scholarship addresses autocratic conceptions and practices of governance, legal and political resistance, transnational repression and forms of complicity with autocratic wrongs. She has previously worked on human rights defence in China in a variety of contexts, including criminal justice, land and housing rights, freedom of expression and association, and wider issues of access to justice.

Current research projects

• Academic freedom, globalised scholarship and the rise of authoritarian China (co-PI with Professor Katrin Kinzelbach, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg; postdoctoral research associates: Dr Christelle Genoud (KCL) and Dr Eva Seiwert, FAU).

Teaching

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