Professor Elaine Chiu is a first generation legal scholar-teacher and advocate for real change.

She recently ended her term as the inaugural Chairperson of the Anti-Asian Violence Task Force of the Asian American Bar Association of New York. This task force has worked tirelessly to respond to the rise in anti-Asian hate in NY with direct assistance for survivors and their loved ones, legislative lobbying, research on prosecutorial outcomes, and community awareness and education campaigns. Its groundbreaking report which Professor Chiu co-edited is called “Endless Tide: The Continuing Struggle to Overcome Anti-Asian Hate in New York," and was published in May 2022. As a result of these efforts, she was appointed in June 2023 to the NYS Bar Association's Task Force on Combating Antisemitism & Anti-Asian Hate.

For the past 21 years, Professor Chiu has been a Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law, a school that has provided access to the legal profession for marginalized communities throughout its almost 100-year history. From 2014 through 2022, she led the school’s Ron Brown Center for Civil Rights, improved the law school's commitment to anti-racism and a diverse learning community and raised $1.2 million.

She also managed the Center's premier pre-law diversity pipeline program, the Ron Brown Prep Program, which helped close to 300 individuals go to law school and become attorneys. Professor Chiu is currently a member of the Board of Directors and the Advisory Council of the Sonia & Celina Sotomayor Judicial Internship Program, another outstanding national pre-law pipeline program.

Professor Chiu is a respected scholar who has written about difficult topics in contemporary criminal justice such as intimate partner violence and drug addiction. Each year, she teaches Criminal Law, Family Law, and a civil rights scholarship course called Perspectives on Justice.

Prior to St. John's, Professor Chiu was a Research Fellow at Columbia La School, a Climenko-Thayer Fellow at Harvard Law School and an adjunct professor at Cardozo Law School. She also served for five years as an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan under DA Robert Morgenthau. Professor Chiu is a first generation college student and a cum laude graduate of Cornell University. She earned her JD at Columbia University School of Law where she was a Senior Editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.