China Program Faculty

Susan W. Tiefenbrun is a Professor of Law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. She received her J.D. from New York University Law School, a Ph.D. with distinction from Columbia University, an M.A. and a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin where she was Phi Beta Kappa as a junior and graduated magna cum laude. Professor Tiefenbrun is Director of the Center of Global Legal Studies at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and Director of the LL.M. Programs in International Trade and Investment and American Legal Studies for foreign lawyers. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor, France’s highest distinction, by Presidential Decree from the Republic of France on July 7, 2003. She was awarded for her service to legal education from the San Diego County Bar Association on April 3, 2004. She was appointed to the Book Awards Committee of the American Society of International Law in 2003 and re-appointed in 2004, and she has been a member of ASIL since l999. She was appointed Master and Scholar in Residence of the Oliver Wendell Holmes American Inns of Court from 2002 to the present. Her special interests are international law, international business transactions, international intellectual property, international human rights law, and law and literature. She has written a book-length study of Soviet laws and Eastern European joint venture laws, numerous articles on international intellectual property and piracy, the World Court, ad hoc courts, and international human rights, as well as global sex trafficking. She has edited three books on law and the arts, war crimes and legal ethics. She is currently writing three books involving international human rights, semiotics and literature; free trade zones in the United States; and women and comparative human rights law. She is President of the Law & Humanities Institute West-coast Branch. She lectures in English, French and Russian on private international law transactions and international trade. Professor Tiefenbrun speaks ten foreign languages. Professor Tiefenbrun is the founding director of the China Program in Hangzhou, China.

Richard J. Goldstone was a judge in South Africa for 23 years, the last nine as a Justice of the Constitutional Court. Since retiring from the bench he has taught as a visiting professor in a number of United States Law Schools. From 1994 to September he was the chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. He was a member of the committee, chaired by Paul Volcker, appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to investigate allegations regarding the Iraq Oil for Food Program. From 1993 to 2003 he served as a member of the International Group of Advisors of the International Committee of the Red Cross. He recently led the UN Fact Finding Mission on Gaza. In May 2009, he received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Award for International Justice.

Leah Christensen received her J.D. from the University of Iowa College with high honors and her B.A. from the University of Chicago where she majored in East Asian Civilizations and Chinese. After law school, Professor Christensen clerked for the Wisconsin Supreme Court and subsequently practiced law for 8 years specializing in commercial litigation. Professor Christensen participated in the Summer 2009 China Program where she taught Comparative Negotiations in International Business. Inspired by her teaching experience in China, Professor Christensen is currently conducting an empirical study of U.S. and Chinese lawyers that examines how culture impacts U.S./China business negotiations. Professor Christensen is also conducting a second empirical study that examines Chinese Legal Education Reform from the perspective of Chinese law students. In addition, Professor Christensen continues to write extensively about law school pedagogy and law student learning. Professor Christensen is thrilled to return to the Summer China Program and looks forward to teaching in China once again.

Claire Wright is an Associate Professor of Law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Prior to joining the faculty of Thomas Jefferson in 2003, Professor Wright was a partner at the international law firm of Baker & McKenzie and a partner at the accounting firm of Ernst & Young LLP. In addition, at Ernst & Young LLP, she was the Director of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Center for the firm. At both Baker & McKenzie and Ernst & Young LLP, she represented a variety of clients around the world on customs, trade, and WTO matters. She has been a member of the American Law Institute (ALI) since 2000, and she participates in an ALI committee that reviews the cases decided by the WTO Appellate Body each year. As part of her trade law practice, she visited China on a number of occasions to assist her clients and meet with government officials. Each spring at Thomas Jefferson, she teaches a class entitled International Trade & the WTO in which the students participate in a “mock trial” exercise using hypothetical WTO dispute cases, and many of these cases have involved China. In addition, each fall she teaches a class entitled International Trade & the Developing Countries. She has also taught WTO law at Stanford Law School and the University of California, San Diego, and she has taught in Thomas Jefferson’s summer program at Zhejiang University Guanghua College of Law during each of the past three summers. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her B.A. from Smith College, and she took the General Course of Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Following graduation from law school, she served as a law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where she worked primarily for then-Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She has worked on a variety of human rights matters for Amnesty International, and she has spoken and published widely on issues involving international trade, the WTO, U.S.-China relations, U.S.-Mexico relations, international trade in cultural products and media services, urban policies and human rights.

Randy Berholtz is an Adjunct Professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law (TJSL) and also the Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of ACON Laboratories, Inc., a Chinese diagnostics company based in San Diego, California and Hangzhou, China. He was previously the Chief Operating Officer of IngleWood Ventures, a San Diego life sciences venture capital firm and also the Acting General Counsel of Nanogen, Inc., a public (Nasdaq National Market) genomic analysis company in San Diego. He is a member of the Life Science Angels, an angel investor group based in Menlo Park, California as well as a member of the Advisory Board of the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences at the Claremont Colleges in Claremont, California. He is the previous Co-Chair of the Practising Law Institute’s Biotechnology Law Seminars and was co-editor of Michael Malinowski’s treatise on Biotechnology Law. He teaches biotechnology law, comparative biotechnology law, patent adjudication and the entrepreneurial law clinic at TJSL. He received his BA summa cum laude from Cornell University, an M.Litt. from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar and a J.D. from the Yale Law School where he was Senior Editor of The Yale Law Journal.

Yongxin Song is a Professor of Law at Zhejiang University Guanghua School of Law. He earned his LL.M. from Beijing University Department of Law and also has a degree in western languages and literature from Beijing University. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Indiana where he did research on American business law. He teaches International law, comparative business organizations, the law of the WTO, Chinese commercial law, international economic law, legal English, and an introduction to the Chinese legal system. He has been a Visiting Professor at several universities outside of China: Griffith University School of Law in Australia, American University Washington College of Law, Marshall University at the John Deaver Drinko Academy, Capital University Law and Graduate Center, and Indiana University School of Law in Bloomington, Indiana. Professor Song has written several books including a Guide to the Law of International Economic Organizations, Unincorporated Business Organizations of the United States, A Concise Dictionary of International Law, and Private International Law, among others. He has also written many scholarly articles on a wide range of subjects including the international human rights obligations of multinational corporations, the application of the comparative fault principle to contracts in China, Chinese partnership law, a new type of limited liability company in the United States, some unique features of the Chinese law of corporations, and China’s new bankruptcy law and its English translation. Professor Song is an active participant in the establishment of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law and Zhejiang University Guanghua School of Law joint venture in international law.

Hongdao Qian is a doctor of jurisprudence and earned a post-doctorate degree in economics. He is the first post-doctorate scholar doing research on the intersection of law and economics. He undertakes an economic analysis of law from the new point of view of Chinese characteristics, has done theoretical work on corporate law, economic law, and comparative law. Before joining Guanghua Law School of Zhejiang University as a professor of law, Professor Qian was a scholar and professor in the graduate school of the Chinese Academy of Social Science, and a senior visiting scholar of Waseda University in 2001. He was also the administrative assistant editor of the Chinese Academic Yearbook, vice-chairman of the China Society of Comparative Law, Chairman of the Board of Supervisors of the China Venture Capital Co., Ltd., commissioner of the Investment Decision Committee, director and vice dean of China Venture Capital Research Institute, and chairman of the Society of Commercial Law of Zhejiang Province, China.

Leslie Kuan-Hsi Wang is the Assistant Dean and Associate Professor at the Zhejiang University Guanghua Law School in Hangzhou, China and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Shizouka University Law School in Shizouka, Japan. Professor Wang has been a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute in Cambridge, MA in the U.S. and the Soochow University Law School in Taipei, Taiwan and a postdoctoral researcher at the Renmin University of China Law School in Beijing, China.