Both inside and outside the classroom, Peter A. Allard School of Law Professor Dr. Hoi Kong is known as a highly approachable, respectful and caring professor who inspires his students to reach their potential.
This spring, he was awarded the George Curtis Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence and the University of British Columbia’s Killam Teaching Prize for his exceptional teaching. With each award, Professor Kong is recognized for his extraordinary skills as an educator and for his work ethic, dedication and humility.
UBC’s Killam Teaching Prize is presented annually to professors across the university who have been nominated by their faculty in recognition of excellence in teaching. The Curtis Award is presented each year to an Allard Law faculty member who has been nominated by their students.
“I’m so touched that students would take time out of their busy schedules to nominate me,” says Professor Kong. “I am deeply grateful for the impact that my teachers have had on me, and I’m honoured to think that some of my students have been similarly impacted by my teaching.”
Professor Kong credits his own law school professors for demonstrating what it means to be “a dedicated teacher, a productive and creative scholar and a generous colleague” – and for encouraging him to consider an academic path. “They inspired me then and they remain my exemplars,” he adds.
Professor Kong’s passion and expertise for the topics he teaches is infectious and make for an overwhelmingly positive classroom environment. It’s clear he puts an immense amount of thought into how he runs his classes.
Today, Professor Kong’s teaching and research focus on constitutional, administrative, municipal and comparative law, and constitutional and public law theory. He is the inaugural holder of The Rt. Hon. Beverley McLachlin, P.C., UBC Professorship in Constitutional Law. Recently, he was also named a 2024-2027 Fellow by the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation.
In his approach to teaching, Professor Kong aims to be both rigorous and responsive. “I try to be rigorous in what I teach: I aim to help students understand the core concepts, debates and ways of reasoning in the relevant areas of law,” he says. “I also try to be rigorous in how I teach. To that end, I implement pedagogical techniques that reflect what is currently known about how adults learn.”
“Professor Kong’s passion and expertise for the topics he teaches is infectious and make for an overwhelmingly positive classroom environment,” as his student nominators note. “It’s clear he puts an immense amount of thought into how he runs his classes.”
Professor Kong’s students also say he brings a “passion for helping classes engage directly with complexity” into the classroom, and that his collaborative, respectful approach to teaching helps bring out the best in them. “Constitutional law engages with difficult issues,” his students note, stressing that Professor Kong is particularly skilled at facilitating highly productive class discussions on complex topics in which “everyone is heard and gets a chance to participate.”
For Professor Kong, one of the most rewarding parts of teaching is to see his students develop their legal skills and their understanding of the law. “It’s an enormous privilege to think through with them incredibly difficult questions of law and policy,” he adds.
