Leo You Li is a J.S.D. candidate at Stanford Law School and a Civil Justice Student Fellow at the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession. He studies comparative courts and civil justice through interdisciplinary methods, with a particular focus on their interplay with emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence. His research also examines the intersections of law, politics, and economic development in China. His works have appeared or will be forthcoming in Law & Social Inquiry, The Yale Journal of International Law, and South Carolina Law Review.

Through these projects, he has explored how courts in different jurisdictions govern the lifecycle of judicial data, how digitization reshapes access to justice across legal cultures, and how social inequality in China is manifested in courtrooms through debt collection lawsuits. His ongoing projects continue to investigate the design of equitable, accessible, and technology-adaptable civil justice systems, with broader inquiries into how such designs may converge or diverge globally.

During his time at Stanford, Leo has been awarded the Gerald J. Lieberman Fellowship (university award for doctoral students who demonstrate broad potential for leadership in academia), the John Hart Ely Prize (for outstanding performance in the Empirical Legal Studies seminar), among other honors. He has worked as a teaching assistant for Professor Amalia Kessler. He has served as the co-president of Stanford China Law and Policy Association and the co-chair of the Eighth Stanford Law-and-Society Conference for Junior Researchers. He has held visiting scholar positions at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law (2024 summer) and the Singapore Management University School of Law (2025 summer).

Before pursuing the J.S.D., Leo obtained a J.S.M. from Stanford Law School as a SPILS Fellow, an LL.M. from University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, and an LL.B. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University Koguan School of Law. He is admitted into the New York Bar Association and holds the Legal Professional Qualification Certificate of the People’s Republic of China.