Yutian An, whose research lies at the intersection of criminal law, administrative law, and comparative law, is joining the UCLA School of Law faculty as an assistant professor.

She will come to UCLA Law in January 2026 from Harvard Law School, where she has been a Climenko Fellow and lecturer. She will defend her Ph.D. dissertation in politics at Princeton University in December.

An employs a variety of empirical research methods in her work, which examines how legal systems structure state-building activities, sociopolitical legitimization, and administrative entrenchment in both authoritarian and democratic regimes, with a focus on criminal law institutions. She also explores the interactions between legal frameworks and the institutional dynamics of local law enforcement, particularly in shaping police conduct and related bureaucratic behavior.

Her presentations and publications, including in the Yale Law & Policy Review, center on issues involving police accountability, juries, the Chinese judiciary, and more. An’s Ph.D. dissertation is titled Legal Authoritarianism: Law, Police, and Courts in China.

She earned her B.A., magna cum laude, from Mount Holyoke College; M.A. in politics from Princeton; and J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as managing editor of the Yale Journal of International Law and editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Humanities.

An previously worked as litigation associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York. She is a member of the New York bar and is qualified to practice law in China after passing the country’s national legal exam.