Jim Chen

Jim Chen is a Professor at Michigan State University College of Law (beginning July 2013), where he teaches Constitutional Law, Regulatory State, and upper-level electives such as Agriculture Law. Chen was formerly a Professor at and Dean of the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law. Chen served as Dean of the U of L Law School for five years, from 2007 to 2012. Before arriving at U of L, Chen was a professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School. While at Minnesota he taught in the areas of administrative law, agricultural law, constitutional law, economic regulation, environmental law, industrial policy, legislation and statutory interpretation, and natural resources law.
While at Minnesota, Chen was active in the school's law journals as an editor of the Constitutional Commentary and the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, as well as an advisor for Theatre of the Relatively Talentless during its first four years. Chen writes on the interrelatedness of mathematics, complexity theory, linguistics, and behavior psychology at Jurisdynamics as well as manages Law Blog Central, a sister site to Jurisdynamics that also previews other law professor blogs. He became the new Dean of University of Louisville Brandeis Law School in January 2007.
Along with Frank H. Wu at Wayne State University Law School, Harold Hongju Koh at Yale Law School, and Wallace Loh at the University of Washington School of Law, Chen is one of four Asian Americans who have held the post of dean at an American law school.
Chen is fluent in Taiwanese and French, among other languages.

Chen received his undergraduate degree and Masters from the Emory University. Following his studies at the University of Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar, he earned his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School where he was executive editor of the Harvard Law Review. He clerked for federal judge Michael Luttig on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Chen has worked as a professor around the world, teaching law at Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf in Düsseldorf, Germany, the University of Nantes in Nantes, France, and at Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, Slovakia.