Professor Shin is a graduate of Dartmouth College, where he received his A.B. summa cum laude with High Honors in Philosophy and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa; and of Harvard Law School, where he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, he clerked for U.S. District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock in Boston, for Judge Sandra Lynch in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and for Judge Norman Stahl, also in the First Circuit. Professor Shin worked for several years as a litigation associate in the Boston office of Hale and Dorr LLP (now WilmerHale). In 2007, Professor Shin received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University. His current research seeks to develop legal conceptions of equality, equal treatment, and discrimination.

Patrick Shin's dissertation examined various conceptions of what might be called the right to equal treatment, i.e. the right of an individual not to be treated differently from other individuals who are similar in morally relevant respects. His central concern is to explore the types of considerations that can and cannot justify differential treatment of individuals. Shin received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Prior to starting his Ph.D. studies, he served as a law clerk for a federal district judge in Boston and for two judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and he also toiled for several years in the litigation department of a large Boston law firm. At Harvard, he has taught a tutorial on the concept of rights and has been a teaching fellow in courses on the philosophy of action, the philosophy of law, and the nature of moral motivation.