Hungdah Chiu


Hungdah Chiu was a Taiwanese legal scholar. He was the president of the Association of Chinese Social Scientists in North America and president of the American Association for Chinese Studies. From 1993 to 1994, he served as a minister without portfolio in the Executive Yuan. He was also the president of the International Law Association from 1998 to 2000.

Early life and education

Chiu was born in Shanghai on March 23, 1936, to a prominent political family affiliated with the Kuomintang. His eldest brother,, was a political dissident in Taiwan. Another brother, Hong-Yee Chiu, became an astrophysicist. Their father, Qiu Han-ping, was a law professor who graduated from Soochow University, earned his doctorate from George Washington University, and served as a KMT legislator. The family moved to Taiwan in 1949 during the Great Retreat.
After high school, Chiu studied law at National Taiwan University, where he was a student of law professor Peng Ming-min and a classmate of Chen Lung-chu. After graduating from NTU with a Bachelor of Laws in 1958, he went to the United States and obtained a Master of Arts in political science from Long Island University in 1962. He then pursued doctoral studies at Harvard University, where he earned a Master of Laws in 1962 and his Doctor of Juridical Science in 1965 from Harvard Law School.
At Harvard, Chiu was classmates with U.S. Senator Elizabeth Dole and Randle Edwards, who became an endowed professor of law at Columbia University. He completed his doctoral thesis on public international law in 1964 under law professor Louis B. Sohn. His dissertation was titled, "The capacity of international organizations to conclude treaties, and the special legal aspects of the treaties so concluded".

Career

After receiving his doctorate from Harvard, Chiu was a research associate at Harvard Law School from 1966 to 1970. During this time, he became a close associate of Professor Jerome A. Cohen. He then returned to Taiwan and was a professor of law at National Chengchi University from 1970 to 1972. He left the university in 1972 and worked as a research associate at Harvard Law School from 1972 to 1974, then became an associate professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. By the end of his career, he had published at least 27 books in English and Chinese and more than 130 journal articles, the most of any law professor at the University of Maryland.
Chiu was a pro-democracy advocate during the period of martial law in Taiwan.

Personal life

Chiu died in Washington, D.C., on April 12, 2011. His wife, Hsieh Yuan-yuan, worked at the Food and Drug Administration. Although he lived in the United States for approximately 50 years, Chiu never became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Awards and honors

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