Academics — Ludien Yen

I study law to design rules that widen justice. That goal has sent me from Ukraine, where I observed how national identity is forged through wartime legislation, to the UAE, where I coded scrapers that untangle EU lobbying patterns. My academic journey has been driven by curiosity at every turn, and each stop tests the same question: how do institutions shape power, and how can evidence make them fairer?

1. Education

I completed a double major in BA Political Science and BA Legal Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), where I graduated magna cum laude. I also took cross-school electives in data science, engineering, and social work during my two semesters at New York University in New York.

Before NYUAD, I was offered admission to the highly competitive judicial officer track at National Taiwan University’s College of Law, an honor extended to just 12 students for the admission cycle. I ultimately chose to pursue the global experience offered by NYUAD over prestige at home. NYUAD’s small cohort (class size 430) and liberal arts focus meant faculty treated undergraduate students as junior colleagues. I learned to critically examine my own assumptions and appreciate the underlying rationales behind diverse perspectives.

NYUAD Vis Moot Team 2023 (from left of table): Chloe Jeong, Wanting Guo, Coach Nawaf AlSulaim, Ludien Yen, Kacper Jarco.

BCDR Pre-Moot 2023 (from left): Kacper Jarco, Ludien Yen, Coach Nawaf AlSulaim, Wanting Guo, Chloe Jeong. / NYUAD Vis Moot Team 2023 (from left of table): Chloe Jeong, Wanting Guo, Coach Nawaf AlSulaim, Ludien Yen, Kacper Jarco.

2. The Vis Moot Competition

My favorite practical academic experience was my two-year involvement with Vis Moot (formally known as the Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot). This competition, typically reserved for graduate law students, required our undergraduate team to draft sophisticated legal memoranda and engage in professional oral arguments before panels of career arbitrators.

In my first year (2022), our team competed against 140 law schools in the Vis East Moot in Hong Kong, and I personally ranked in the top 30% of 450 competing oralists. In my second year (2023) as Issue Leader for the memoranda, the section I solely wrote and edited received a special commendation from the memoranda scorer, who called it “something [the reviewer] did not hear nor read anywhere and is really interesting argument [sic] … [that] makes sense and convinces [the reviewer].” In the oral arguments that year, my team advanced to the semi-finals of the BCDR Middle East Pre-moot, where I was personally awarded third place for best Claimant oralist.

Academic Seminar in Ukraine: Nation-Building in the Shadow of Empire, January Term 2020.

3. Academic Seminar on Nation-Building in Ukraine

In January 2020, I was one of fifteen students selected for an intensive seminar on post-colonial nation-building, with contemporary Ukraine as a case study. Led by Professor Leonid Peisakhin, it blended academic theory with on-the-ground observations. We examined how political identities are formed in the shadow of a former imperial neighbor. After studying the foundational literature, our seminar travelled to Kyiv, Lviv, and Odesa. We met with a sitting MP, a cabinet member, and we had a private audience with former President Viktor Yushchenko.

President Yushchenko framed Ukraine as a “quasi-nation,” which reframed my understanding of complex post-Soviet identities. I synthesized these learnings in my coursework, producing a policy proposal arguing that a federal, EU-leaning framework anchored in a shared generational trauma event, the Holodomor, offers a path to reconcile the Russian-speaking oblasts with Kyiv’s west-facing ambitions. I left Ukraine convinced that durable nation-building cannot be achieved through erasure of rival identities, but through institutions that allow multiple loyalties to compete, and eventually converge, within the same constitutional homeland.

Title page of capstone defense. / Opening quote of capstone defense.

4. Capstone Project on EU Lobbying Dynamics

My senior thesis began as a question on regulatory capture and ended as a yearlong quantitative political science capstone. Titled “Who gets to lobby the EU? An empirical evaluation of EU lobbying dynamics,” the project entailed building a custom scraper for the EU Transparency Register. I merged 50,000+ lobbying disclosures, meeting diaries, grants data, and org charts, then modeled access patterns with Stata to show how the European Commission quietly rebalances corporate influence by favoring civil-society groups during crucial legislative processes.

My research delivered the first quantified evidence that the Commission actively engineers its lobbying landscape, identifying specific mechanisms like public interest grants and agenda-setting consultations. Informed by industry insight, I was able to identify gaps in existing EU transparency regulations.

5. The Cambridge LLM

In 2026, I completed the Master of Law (LL.M.) at the University of Cambridge, as a member of Lucy Cavendish College. I read EU Trade Law, EU Competition Law, EU AI Law, and Legislation papers. The combination was deliberate. Regulatory and competition law strike me as the most powerful tools for advancing democratic welfare in an age where private tech-company rule-making reaches across the globe.

The next step is qualifying as a solicitor in England and Wales, and building a practice around exactly that intersection.