Before coming to Melbourne in 2015, William was an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law of Chinese University Hong Kong, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer at Columbia University Law School, and a Fellow at The Brookings Institution. William holds a JD from Stanford Law School as well as a DPhil in Soviet History and MPhil in Russian and East European Studies from the University of Oxford (where he was a Clarendon Scholar). He also holds an honours bachelor degree in International Affairs and Public Policy from Princeton University and speaks Russian.