Professor Chien’s scholarship and teaching address various legal subjects through doctrinal, comparative, and empirical perspectives. His research has focused on multiple aspects of the legal profession, including the exercise and control of prosecutorial and police discretion; police interrogation; Miranda warnings; prosecutors’ socialization experience; institutional reforms in prosecutors’ offices and police agencies; and the formation and reproduction of elite cultures in professional legal settings, such as prosecutors’ offices and judicial clerkships. He has published, in both English and Mandarin, multiple journal articles and book chapters concerning the legal profession and criminal justice, with sociological, comparative, historical, and empirical perspectives. His teaching interests include criminal law; criminal procedure; professional responsibility; evidence; comparative law; and empirical legal studies.

Prior to joining Cleveland-Marshall, Chien worked as a Research Social Scientist at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, where he conducted several empirical research projects on American legal profession and served as a member of the editorial committee of the internationally renowned journal Law and Social Inquiry. His main research project – Portrait Project 2.0: Asian Americans in the Legal Profession – examines the factors, from self-selection to discriminatory bias, that shape the careers of Asian American lawyers to understand why they are not reaching the upper echelons of the U.S. legal profession.

Professor Chien helped design a series of courses on the American criminal justice system for Taiwanese lawyers and judicial apprentices in the Academy for the Judiciary in Taiwan. While working as a fellow for the non-profit organization Fair and Just Prosecution, he conducted several policy reform projects that focused on wrongful convictions, the use and misuse of criminal justice data by prosecutors, and best practices for designing and incorporating Conviction Integrity Units into modern prosecutors’ offices. Chien also served as a member of the Street Violence Response Team in San Francisco, California, where he helped identify successful enforcement and prevention strategies for the city. With his social science and empirical training, Chien has assisted several prosecutors’ offices in formulating policies as to asset forfeitures, post-conviction review, and the implementation of “big data” prosecution.