Before joining academia, Richard was a partner of Messrs Johnson Stokes & Master (now renamed as Mayer Brown). He was qualified in four common law jurisdictions, and is eligible to practise as Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Hong Kong; Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales; Barrister and Solicitor of the Australian Capital Territory, Australia; Barrister of High Court of Australia; Advocate and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Republic of Singapore; and Legal Practitioner of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Australia.
Richard studied common law and Chinese law at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels at top law schools in three global cities: Hong Kong, Beijing and London. Apart from law, he also received academic training in other disciplines like economics, business administration, sociology and social policy. Richard completed his doctoral dissertation at University of London, and is active in interdisciplinary and empirical legal research. His research focuses on four major areas: Comparative Legal Ethics, Legal Education and Legal Profession; Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Regulation, Chinese Banking Regulation and Comparative Property and Urban Law.
Richard teaches “Innovations, Creativity and Ethics for Globalized Legal Practice” and “Law and Social Administration” at undergraduate level, as well as “China Practice“ and “Property Transactions” at postgraduate level. Over the years, he has designed and taught new courses for law schools in Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, United Kingdom and Israel. His teaching promotes interdisciplinary study of law and experiential learning in law. He also teaches “Comparative Urban Law” at Peking University School of Transnational Law (comparing urban law in Hong Kong and Shenzhen), which is the first urban law course in Greater Bay Area law schools. In 2021, Richard was awarded the HKU Faculty Teaching Award in recognition of the new law courses that he designed for law schools in Greater China Region.
Currently, Richard is co-authoring a book manuscript titled “The Good Chinese Lawyer” with two other international scholars, which will be published by Cambridge University Press. What is more, he actively engages in knowledge exchange about legal issues arising from Covid-19 with local school teachers in Hong Kong, legal technology and well-being in the era of Covid-19 with lawyers in Australia and China, as well as knowledge exchange about legal ethics with civil law students in China and Taiwan.
Richard has maintained an impressive grant record in terms of number of external grants and amount of grant monies. His external grants include six grants from General Research Fund (‘GRF’) and one Public Policy Research Grant from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong. In the past decade, he obtained five consecutive GRF grants to undertake a comparative and empirical study of ethical values of future lawyers in fourteen jurisdictions including Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, India, Philippines, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Russia, and South Africa. He has published widely the research findings in top-tiered international journals like China Quarterly, Journal of Legal Education and Journal of Comparative Law.
