Keith
Hand

Professor Keith J. Hand brings more than 25 years of professional experience in private practice, government, and academia to his teaching and research at UC Law SF. Professor Hand’s research focuses on legal reform in the Greater China, with particular attention to constitutional law, citizen efforts to use the law to promote legal and political change, Chinese domestic law as a tool of foreign policy, and China’s anti-sanctions regime.  In January 2015, he co-founded the UC Law SF East Asian Legal Studies Program with Senior Professor Setsuo Miyazawa.  From 2016 to 2022, he served as Associate Dean for Global Programs. Professor Hand is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and a non-resident scholar with the 21st Century China Center at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy

Professor Hand holds a JD and an MAIS in China Studies from the University of Washington and a BA from Whitman College. As a law student, he served as editor-in-chief of the Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal. After graduating Order of the Coif in 2000, he joined the New York office of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where his practice focused on mergers and acquisitions and private equity funds. He later served as senior counsel to the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China. Immediately prior to joining the UC Law SF faculty in 2009, Professor Hand was Beijing director, senior fellow, and lecturer-in-law at Yale Law School’s China Law Center and visiting scholar at Peking University Law School. During his tenure with the Center, Professor Hand worked with Chinese courts, government agencies and law schools to implement cooperative legal reform projects in the areas of criminal justice, judicial reform and property law.

Professor Hand has been cited as an expert on Chinese legal issues in a wide variety of media, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Deutsche Welle, Radio Free Asia, Reuters, The Christian Science Monitor, ChinaFile, and Time. In 2011, Professor Hand was named a National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Public Intellectuals Fellow. In 2014, he was presented with the UC Law SF Foundation Faculty Award for Scholarship.

A native of Seattle, Professor Hand enjoys the outdoors and rarely turns down an opportunity to travel through remote regions of Asia or ski, cycle, or hike at home.