Jianlin grew up in Singapore and Taiwan. He obtained his LLB from National University of Singapore, and his LLM and JSD from the University of Chicago. He is qualified to practice in Singapore and New York. He joined the Melbourne Law School in July 2017 after starting his academic career at the University of Hong Kong in 2011.

Bilingual in English and Chinese, Jianlin publishes widely, with a monograph from Cambridge University Press, and in law journals such as Columbia Journal of Asian Law, Law & Social Inquiry, Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, 公司法评论, 北大法律评论, among many others. His primarily research interests are in the areas of natural resources law and property law, with a particular focus in emerging natural resources (e.g., wind, sunlight, atmospheric moisture) and through a combination of comparative perspectives and economic analysis.

Together with other previous and current research projects that traverse diverse subject matters (e.g., law& religion, corporate law, government procurement, securities regulations, culture war, tax law), his underlying research agenda is to develop an overarching theoretical inquiry that 1) explores how the different forms of state actions—ranging from law, regulation, tax, state ownership, public contract, government speech—have surprisingly similar capacity and propensity (or the lack thereof) to achieve public interest objectives; and 2) critically evaluates the prevailing approach of prescribing distinct legal constraints and normative considerations for each category of state interventions.