Hin-Yan Liu

Hin-Yan Liu is Associate Professor at the Centre for International Law, Conflict and Crisis, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. His disparate research themes are animated by a deep concern for subtle structural biases that look a lot like injustice, but which are imperceptible to contemporary legal processes and which cannot be articulated through legal precepts. His book, Law’s Impunity is a first attempt to systematically examine the idea that ordinary legal processes may be the very source of the impunity challenges that the law is often deployed to overcome.

His research agenda into the area of robotics and artificial intelligence passed through the Autonomous Weapons Systems debate, and he was a member of the steering group behind the recent Autonomous Weapons Systems – Law, Policy, Ethics volume. But since the potentially disruptive influences of robotics and artificial intelligence throws up a range of broader issues as these technologies move into the civilian realm, he developed a new course, RoboLaw, to explore them in greater depth. Beyond the more pedestrian challenges raised by these brilliant technologies, he is fascinated by how we human beings might be the architects of our own demise by, among many other things, attempting to build artificial intelligence. To excavate these questions, and in an effort to craft law and policy solutions to prevent or mitigate these risks, he has started a new course Existential Risks and the Law with a colleague.

Hin-Yan had previously held academic positions at the University of Westminster, King’s College London, and New York University in Florence. He has also been a Max Weber Fellow and subsequently a Research Fellow at the European University Institute, and he has also been a Max Planck Society Post-Doctoral Research Scholar visiting their Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiberg.