Dr. Alvin Y.H. Cheung is a Non-Resident Affiliated Scholar at NYU's U.S.-Asia Law Institute. Prior to his current appointment at Queen's Law, Alvin was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University Faculty of Law (2020-22) and a Sessional Instructor at Queen's Law (Spring 2020). He holds degrees from NYU (J.S.D. 2020; LL.M. in International Legal Studies, 2014) and Cambridge (M.A. 2011), and has worked in Hong Kong as a barrister and as a lecturer in Law & Public Affairs at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Dr. Cheung's research focuses on the relationship between law and authoritarianism. His doctoral project, "Abusive Legalism," addresses the systematic abuse of sub-constitutional legal norms and institutions by authoritarian regimes; his postdoctoral paper, "This Land is My Land," focuses on situations in which governments, by virtue of acting in a "private law" capacity as landholder, can pursue illiberal or antidemocratic goals.
In addition, Dr Cheung has written and presented extensively about legal developments in Hong Kong for academic, specialist, and lay audiences. In particular, he wrote a comprehensive assessment of the public international law implications of Chief Executive electoral changes (2014, 2015), warned that Beijing sought to transform Hong Kong into a dual state (ChinaFile 2017), and anticipated the political capture of the territory’s civil service (Lowy Interpreter 2019).