Hwa-Jin Kim is an L. Bates Lea Global Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. He joined Michigan Law’s faculty as a William W. Cook Global Law Professor in 2011.

Kim has taught at Seoul National University School of Law, NYU Law in Shanghai, Tel Aviv University, and Stanford Law School. He is published in the Journal of Corporation Law, Oxford University Comparative Law Forum, Columbia Business Law Review, Berkeley Journal of International Law, and elsewhere.

Kim is licensed to practice law in New York (inactive). Before joining academia in 2006, Kim practiced corporate and securities law in Korea and Switzerland, where he advised and worked for or with global investment banking houses in their international mergers and acquisitions, private equity, and capital market transactions.

Kim is the chair of the board of directors of Samsung Securities of the Samsung Group and the lead independent director of Hyundai Mobis of the Hyundai Motor Group. He was the independent director of HD Hyundai, the world’s largest shipbuilder, and Macquarie Korea Infrastructure Fund, the largest mutual fund in Korea.

Kim is chair of the corporate governance committee of the National Pension Service of Korea. He has advised the Office of the President of the Republic of Korea; the Korea Financial Supervisory Service; and the Ministry of Justice, Republic of Korea. He was the public interest director of the Korea Financial Investment Association and chair of the Korea Securities Depository’s Derivative Services Committee.

He won the Book Prize from the Korean National Academy of Sciences in 2005, 2010, and 2015. His recent books in Korean include, Theories in International Law (2017), Investment Banking, 7th ed. (2019), Corporate Governance, 9th ed. (2023), Geopolitics and Mobility (2024), and Global Finance: A History (2025).