The Faculty of Law was the first law school in Hong Kong and is regarded as one of the most prestigious law schools internationally. It is the Faculty’s mission to train first-rate legal professionals of the highest calibre and with the highest integrity as well as leaders with broad international exposure, vision and commitment to society.

Building upon the SAR’s unique position as the only common law jurisdiction in China, the Faculty has an irreplaceable role to play in scholarship, research and education on common law and comparative law, as well as the development of the rule of law in China.

Hong Kong’s geo-political position also provides unique opportunities for research into the theory and philosophy of law. Professor Scott Veitch is an expert in jurisprudence and an award-winning author, writing and teaching in the areas of legal, political and social theory. He is the first incumbent of the Paul K C Chung Professorship in Jurisprudence.

Educated in Scotland, he has worked at universities in the United Kingdom and Australia, and has held visiting academic positions in South Africa, New Zealand, Belgium and France. Professor Veitch joined the Faculty of Law at this year.

His area of research is jurisprudence, and his work draws on historical, philosophical and ethical insights into law and legal institutions. More specifically it deals with the politics of domestic and international law; critical aspects of legal reasoning; the role of law in processes of transition and its bearing on reconciliation and memory; and the relations between legal concepts and political economy.

His work is inter-disciplinary and engages methodologies which draw on comparative, sociological and historical analysis. Professor Veitch’s most recent monograph was concerned with the ways in which contemporary law and legal institutions organise global irresponsibility. It was the subject of the book symposium in the 2009 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy. Professor Veitch’s first monograph – Moral Conflict and Legal Reasoning (1999) – was an analysis of legal reasoning and institutions from the conflicting perspectives of the liberal theory of Isaiah Berlin and the liberal critique of Alasdair MacIntyre, and was the winner of the European Award for Legal Theory.

He is regularly invited to give presentations around the world and has written numerous articles, as well as being the author or editor of six books. His current research projects include comparing legal traditions in their philosophical and socio-economic contexts; a critical evaluation of citizenship and the common good in the European Union; and representations of pain in legal and aesthetic contexts.

This Endowed Professorship was inaugurated in 2007.