William P. Alford is the Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He considers himself privileged to have been associated with the players, graduates, coaches and staff of the Harvard Men’s Hockey Program as a Faculty Fellow (and before that, informal advisor) for some two decades.
As Faculty Fellow, Bill (and Tim Brown) work to ensure that team members are able to take full advantage of the Harvard experience. Bill and Tim advise team members about courses, summer internships, graduate school, and career opportunities. They also over the years have arranged periodic social events that bring team members together with faculty and senior members of the University administration, floor hockey matches with a local Special Olympics team, and career panels with leading experts from fields such as finance, law and education, among other activity. In 2020, they established the Alford-Brown Award intended annually to honor a team member each who exhibits exemplary qualities on the ice (whether in games or practices), in the classroom and in the community.
Bill is a scholar of Chinese law and society, and has also taught courses and/or written about the US-PRC relationship, international trade, public international law, disability law, intercollegiate sports, and the history of Harvard Law School. He is the founding Chair of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, which since 2004 works, on a pro bono basis, on disability law and policy in China, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam, the United States and several other nations. Long involved with Special Olympics International (which serves individuals with intellectual disabilities in more than 180 nations), he was first elected to its board in 2005, and now serves as Lead Director and Chair of the Executive Committee of the board. In addition, having recently stepped down after serving as the Law School’s first Vice Dean heading up its Graduate Program and International Legal Studies (from 2002 to 2021), he now serves Senior Advisor for these programs, as well as Director of East Asian Legal Studies.
Bill was awarded an honorary doctorate in law by the University of Geneva in 2010, has been an honorary professor at Renmin University of China and Zhejiang University, and was a recipient of the Harvard Law School Alumni Association Award in 2015, the Li Buyun Prize of the Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law in 2018, the American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit for the Best Specialized Work in International Law in 2020, a National Order of Merit from the President of Ecuador in 2021, and several other awards. He is a graduate of Amherst College, the University of Cambridge (UK) in law, Yale (with graduate degrees in Chinese Studies and History)  and Harvard Law School (where he did his J.D.). His books include To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization (Stanford University Press 1995), Raising the Bar: The Emerging Legal Profession in East Asia (Harvard EALS 2007), (A Study of Legal Mechanisms to Protect Persons with Disabilities) (Huaxia Press 2008, with Wang Liming and Ma Yu’er), Prospects for the Professions in China (Routledge 2011, with William Kirby and Kenneth Winston), Taiwan and International Human Rights (Springer 2019, with Jerome A. Cohen and Lo Chang-fa) and An Oral History of Special Olympics in China (Springer 2020, in three volumes with Liao Mei and Cui Fengming).Â
