April Xiaoyi Xu joined the full-time faculty at Tulane Law School in 2025 as a Forrester Fellow. She teaches two sections of Legal Research and Writing each semester, and focuses her research on criminal law and health law. April earned her Juris Doctor degree from Harvard in May 2021. She started her legal career as a federal judicial law clerk and gained cross-border litigation experience at Allen & Overy and Orrick. She is dual-licensed to practice law in New York and Texas.
April was President of the Harvard Asia Law Society and a Salzburg Cutler Fellow in International Law. She was the Teaching Fellow for Judge Joseph Greenaway's "Great Cases of the Supreme Court" course, as well as a Research Assistant to HLS professors Jeannie Suk Gersen, Noah Feldman, and Urs Gasser, MIT professor Amy Finkelstein, and HLS PILAC. She interned for Judge Hellerstein at SDNY. April was a masthead member for 4 Harvard law journals and Cambridge Law Review (UK). April served as President of the Harvard Law School Association's RGN Board.
April was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship. She graduated summa cum laude from Pomona College in 2018. April was elected to both Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Delta Pi junior year, and received the Phi Beta Kappa Graduate Scholarship, Downing Scholarship (full merit scholarship for the University of Cambridge's MPhil degree), Bernard Chan Service Award, John A. Vieg Politics Prize, and Dole-Kinney Creative Writing Award.
A freelance writer for 15 publications in 3 languages including the Huffington Post, South China Morning Post, and Caixin since high school, April has published more than 100 articles. She served as Editor-in-Chief of the Claremont Journal of Law and Public Policy.
April enjoys singing, creative writing, tennis, Zumba, swimming, and learning foreign languages.
