Xiaohan (Sharon) Zhang is a DPhil in Law student at Balliol College, under the supervision of Professor Liz Fisher. Her research is generously sponsored by the Rhodes Scholarship. Previously, she completed her LLB at Zhejiang University as a recipient of Chu Kochen Award. She then obtained an LLM from Peking University Law School, and an MPhil in Law from the University of Oxford. Sharon has interned with the Supreme People’s Court of China, China Academy of Information and Communications Technologies and other research institutions, with experiences in promoting judicial reforms and legislative processes in China.
DPhil topic
Sharon’s project focuses on expert administration and the administrative law framework that governs it. Specifically, this project reflects on the legality and legitimacy of modern administrative practices, such as regulatory impact assessment (‘RIA’), adaptive management, etc, and aims to deepen the understanding of the administrative state by observing it through the lens of law and expertise. Through a comparative analysis of China and the United States, this project examines the processes by which expertise is generated, circulated and utilized in specific regulatory mechanisms, as well as its potential diffusion in different jurisdictions.
