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Staff profile

Overview

Jianxuan Hu

Biography

Jianxuan is a PhD candidate at Durham Law School and was awarded the Modern Law Review Scholar. She is also the Deputy Director of the Centre for Criminal Law and Criminal Justice.

Before her PhD, she earned a Bachelor of Law from Minzu University of China (2017-2021). Following this, she achieved her Master of Law degree from Georgetown University Law Center (2021-2022), where she received the Georgetown Law Merit-Based Scholarship, graduated with Distinction, and was honored on the Dean’s List. Deepening her passion for Criminology, she subsequently completed an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Edinburgh (2022-2023), graduating with high Merit.

She has been awarded a fully-funded fellowship by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law, where she will spend a three-month research stay in the summer of 2025.

She is currently a part-time tutor, teaching seminars on Introduction to English Law and Legal Methods (ELLM) and tutorials on UK Constitutional Law for the 2024/25 academic year.

Current Research

Jianxuan’s PhD research, supervised by Prof Thom Brooks and Dr Zhiyu Li, focuses on the conceptualisation and implications of penal populism.

Penal populism is a form of populism. It is a social phenomenon in which the general public advocates for harsher punishment of offenders, emphasising the common-sense notion of 'just deserts' and the perspectives of laypeople. This project aims to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding penal populism: how to define it, what the driving forces are, and how this social phenomenon impacts the criminal justice system. It integrates existing social science terminology, critiques neoliberalism’s influence on public perceptions of crime and punishment, and explores punishment philosophy, among other related areas. The goal is to elevate the study of penal populism to a more theoretical and even philosophical level while ensuring it remains firmly grounded in existing academic knowledge.

Research interests

  • Criminal Law, Criminology, and Criminal Justice