About the Authors
Stephen N. Subrin
Stephen Subrin is a professor of Law at Northeastern University. Before joining the Northeastern University faculty in 1970, Professor Subrin practiced civil litigation and labor law for seven years with the Boston firm of Burns & Levinson, where he became a partner in 1966. He has published extensively on civil procedure, with an emphasis on procedure reform, and the historical background of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.Professor Subrin has taught Civil Procedure, Evidence, Complex Litigation, Alternative Dispute Resolution, Federal Courts and The Legal Imagination. He was reporter to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Standing Advisory Committee on Rules of Civil Procedure for 12 years and was consultant to the reporter on the Local Rules Project of the Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States.
Along with coauthoring Litigating in America, Professor Subrin is coauthor of a seminal casebook, Civil Procedure: Doctrine, Practice, and Context.
Professor Subrin has taught Civil Procedure at Harvard Law School and Renmin University in Beijing, China, and Complex Litigation at Yale Law School. He has also taugh Introduction to the American Legal System at the Cornell Law School Paris Summer Institute.
Margaret Y. K. Woo
Professor Woo teaches Civil Procedure, Administrative Law and Comparative Law at Northeastern University. In 1997 she was named the law school's Distinguished Professor of Public Policy. She is a former fellow of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and is presently an associate in research at the East Asian Legal Studies Center of Harvard Law School and the Fairbank Center of Harvard College.Professor Woo has published and spoken widely on China's legal reforms. She is the co-editor of East Asian Law - Universal Norms and Local Cultures (Cruzon/Routledge Publishers, 2003), a collection of interdisciplinary studies on the competing tensions of global/local forces on East Asian identities and legal systems. She is also the co-author of American Civil Litigation (Aspen Publishers, forthcoming), which places American civil procedure in historical, empirical and sociological context.
At present, Professor Woo is working on a joint study with a group of legal scholars from Tsinghua University and Peking University in Beijing, China. This study has collected empirical data from the Chinese courts and is the first systematic analysis of current Chinese legal reforms. As part of this work, Professor Woo is co-authoring an article, "Civil Justice in China," with Professor Wang Yaxin, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. The article analyzes initial data collected from three different intermediate courts in China, each representing a different stage of legal reform.
Among her other activities, Professor Woo is also committed to Asian American and civil rights issues, serving as a board member of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Harry Dow Legal Assistance Memorial Fund and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. She is chair of the Association of American Law School's standing Committee on Retention and Recruitment of Minority Law Teachers, as well as a member of the executive committee for the Section on Civil Procedure.
