About Ming Hsu Chen

MING HSU CHEN is Professor and Harry & Lillian Hastings Research Chair at the University of California College of Law, San Francisco specializing in immigration, race and the administrative state. In 2022, she founded the Center for Race, Immigration, Citizenship, and Equality. She is the author of Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era (Stanford Press 2020) and served on the state advisory board to the US Commission on Civil Rights from 2016-2020. From 2011-2021, Ming was a Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Ming was born to parents of Chinese heritage who immigrated to Taiwan and then the United States after the 1965 liberalization of US immigration policy. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with a degree in social studies and the study of religion, and she completed a JD at New York University Law School and a Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley.

Before entering academia, Ming worked for the US Department of Justice, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the US Equal Employment opportunity Commission, and the Brookings Institution. She also clerked on the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals with Judge James Browning.

Ming is married to civil rights attorney Stephen Chen. Together they have a daughter, Maya, and reside in the Bay Area.