About James M.
James M. Chen came to the law after a lengthy engagement with literature and language. He earned a B.A. from Emory University in 1983 and later completed an M.A. in English at Emory in 1987. He then went on to earn a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1991.
Chen moved into federal clerkships immediately after law school. He clerked for Judge J. Michael Luttig on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 1991 and spent the following year, 1992, as a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas at the Supreme Court of the United States. Those early positions placed him inside the machinery of appellate decision-making at a formative moment in his career.
He entered academia in the years after his clerkships and held a named professorship at the University of Minnesota beginning in 2001 as the James L. Krusemark Professor of Law. He served as a professor of law at the University of Louisville in 2012 and moved to Michigan State University the next year. In 2013 he was appointed the Justin Smith Morrill Chair in Law and continued teaching courses and supervising scholarship at the college of law there.
In 2020 Chen took a role outside the academy as executive vice president and chief data scientist for Sliver Leaf Capital LLC. That position added an executive and technical dimension to a career that had been largely spent in teaching and scholarly work. The move illustrates how some legal academics engage operational roles in private enterprise while maintaining ties to law schools.
Chen holds active memberships in both the District of Columbia Bar and the Virginia State Bar. His combined experience—courtroom chambers, law school classrooms, and an executive data post—gives him an unusual professional profile. Colleagues and students have encountered him as a teacher, a clerkship mentor, and an administrator.
He continues to divide his time between Michigan State University College of Law and responsibilities at Sliver Leaf Capital LLC. His current practice centers on legal education and the application of data analysis to legal and institutional questions.
