Elaine Chiu is a first-generation legal scholar-teacher and a leading expert on motive and criminal laws. For more than two decades, Professor Chiu has been a Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law, a school that has provided access to the legal profession throughout its 100-year history. From 2014 to 2022, she led the school’s Ron Brown Center for Civil Rights and helped close to 300 diverse individuals become attorneys. Professor Chiu currently serves on the Board of Directors and Advisory Council of the Sonia & Celina Sotomayor Judicial Internship Program, a nationally renowned pre-law pipeline program.
From 2022 through 2023, she was the inaugural Chairperson of the Anti-Asian Violence Task Force of AABANY. Professor Chiu co-edited its groundbreaking report entitled Endless Tide: The Continuing Struggle to Overcome Anti-Asian Hate in New York and also co-produced a documentary called Voices Against Anti-Asian Hate featuring survivors, their loved ones and community advocates. Click here to view the trailer.
Her current scholarly focus is on the laws governing hate crimes. Her latest article, “The Model Minority Victim”, was published in 2025 in the Santa Clara Law Review. In March 2026, Professor Chiu was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney School of Law. While there, she studied the attacks against Asian Australians inspired by COVID and our shared experiences of anti-Asian hate and violence.
Professor Chiu is a first-generation college student and a cum laude graduate of Cornell University. She earned her JD at the Columbia University School of Law where she was a Senior Editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.
Elaine is a Speaker for the Race and Space: How Laws Create and Impact Asian Spaces program.