Yijia Lu

Biographical Sketch

Yijia Lu is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. His scholarship centers on the economic analysis of dispute resolution and enforcement. He examines how enforcement mechanisms—such as intrinsic moral motivation, reputation, monetary sanctions, and specific performance—and institutional features—including jury trial, plea bargaining, and adjudication delay—shape incentives and outcomes in legal processes. Alongside theoretical analysis, Professor Lu conducts laboratory experiments on motivational crowding out, judicial interest rates, and jury instructions. His research also extends to comparative law and political economy.

Professor Lu’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Law and Economics Review, Alabama Law Review, Harvard Negotiation Law Review, International Review of Law and Economics, and the Journal of Public Economic Theory. He also contributed to a report submitted to the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs.

Before joining Scalia Law, Professor Lu was a Law and Economics Fellow at New York University School of Law and a Paris Seine Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at ESSEC Business School in France and Singapore. He also served as a visiting professor and scholar of law at the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas.

Professor Lu holds a B.A. in Physics, magna cum laude, from Princeton University; a J.D. from Stanford Law School, where he was a John M. Olin Fellow; and a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University. A speaker of eight languages, he has broad interest in how cultural—especially legal-cultural—differences shape human behavior and interactions.

Professor Lu teaches Contracts I & II, Scholarly Writing, and Alternative Dispute Resolution.