Zhang, Jingjing is a prominent Chinese environmental lawyer, and now a Lecturer in Law at Transnational Environmental Accountability Project, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. Through her work as the first litigation director with the Beijing-based Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims between 1999 and 2008, Zhang won several milestone environmental litigation cases in the Chinese courts, and was called China’s Erin Brockovich. From 2015 to 2018, she has been travelling intensively under her Open Society Fellowship to investigate Chinese companies’ environmental and human rights performances in Africa and Latin America. She now is working on cutting-edge transnational environmental lawsuits, and testing various legal avenues to ensure Chinese overseas companies’ compliance with laws and international human rights norms.
Zhang earned her Master’s of Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and her law degrees from Wuhan Univ. and China Univ. of Political Science and Law. She was a Yale World Fellow in 2008, a visiting scholar at Yale China Law Center (2009) and Harvard Law School East Asia Legal Studies (2013-14).