About Tsinghua China Law Review

Tsinghua China Law Review

The Tsinghua China Law Review (TCLR) is a student-edited, English-language law review based at Tsinghua University School of Law in Haidian, Beijing. Founded as an organisation in 2008, with publication beginning in May 2009, it carries the ISSN 2151-8904 and is cited as Tsinghua China L. Rev. It describes itself — and is described by its law school — as the first student-run, English-language journal of legal scholarship published by a mainland Chinese university. Modelled in format on the law reviews of American law schools, it publishes scholarly articles and notes on Chinese law for a global audience, twice a year. In a legal-publishing landscape in which most Chinese legal scholarship appears in Chinese, the Review was created to make scholarship on Chinese law available, in English and in a familiar law-review form, to readers around the world.

The Review's mission statement sets out that ambition plainly. It seeks to be a publication of the highest quality, publishing scholarly articles on legal issues affecting China; to reach legal scholars, judges, lawyers, law students and others interested in China's legal system throughout the world, in order to deepen understanding of China's laws and society; to increase the level of legal scholarship in China; to support the development of China's legal system as a system of rule of law; and to elevate the reputation of the Tsinghua School of Law as a world-class institution for the study of law.

Origins in the LL.M. programme in Chinese law

The Review grew directly out of an English-taught degree programme. Tsinghua's own history of the journal records that, with the founding of the LL.M. Program in Chinese Law in 2005, the Tsinghua School of Law was the first law school in China to have an LL.M. programme for foreign law students and legal professionals, taught entirely in English. The programme grew to be described by the school as the largest and most recognised foreign LL.M. programme in China; students in the 2009 class came from 15 countries, with diverse educational backgrounds, legal qualifications and professional experience.

In the fall of 2008, students from that LL.M. programme decided that a law review published in English could increase the level of scholarship on Chinese law available to a global audience. In December 2008 the students submitted a draft proposal to the law school administration, which supported the idea in spirit and in substance and provided the Review with office space and access to law school resources. The organisation was founded in 2008 on that basis, and publication followed in May 2009. From the beginning, the Review was designed as a collaborative effort between foreign and Chinese law students within the school.

The law school behind the Review

Tsinghua University School of Law, the Review's home, has a discontinuous history that the Review's founders inherited. The school was originally established in 1929, and its early graduates included famous legal scholars, judges and lawyers. In 1952, amid the restructuring of higher education in China, the school was merged into Peking University and other universities. Tsinghua Law School was re-established in 1995 — the Department of Law was formally restored on 8 September 1995 — in response to the country's call for establishing and enhancing the rule of law, and in April 1999 the department formally became the School of Law, with the Mingli Building completed and put into use in December 1999.

The Review's editorial address reflects that rebuilt institution: its submissions calls give its home as Room 106, Mingli Building, Tsinghua University School of Law, Beijing 100084. A student law review founded in 2008 thus belonged to a law school that had itself been restored only thirteen years earlier, and both school and journal were part of the same project of rebuilding legal education at Tsinghua with an international orientation — of which the English-taught LL.M. in Chinese Law, launched in 2005, was another part.

A student board and a faculty advisory board

The Review is student-edited. Its Board of Editors is composed of students at the Tsinghua University School of Law, both Chinese and international students studying in various Chinese law programmes. Tsinghua's history of the journal notes that, from the current composition of the board, there are roughly equal numbers of foreign and Chinese students — a staff the school says allows the Review to draw on the strengths, skills and substantive knowledge developed in many different legal systems, and whose cross-cultural and cross-jurisdictional character is meant to be evident in the quality of the journal.

Students do not work alone. The Board of Editors collaborates on publication decisions with a group of Tsinghua School of Law faculty, the TCLR Faculty Advisory Board. That combination — student editors making a working law review, with a faculty advisory structure behind them — follows the American law-review tradition the journal explicitly adopted, adapted to a Chinese law school in which many of the student editors are themselves legally trained in other jurisdictions.

Format, citation and the American law-review model

The format of the TCLR is similar to United States law reviews, and it follows the Bluebook rules for legal citation; its later submissions calls specify the 21st edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. For readers in common-law countries, that choice makes articles on a civil-law-influenced system immediately usable: the apparatus of footnotes, signals and citation forms is the one used by the leading American law reviews, even though the substantive law under discussion is China's.

The subject matter, by contrast, is defined by China. The Review covers topics related to Chinese law and analyses Chinese law in its socio-political context — including constitutional and administrative law, civil and commercial law, criminal justice, and China's engagement with international law, with contributions from Chinese and foreign scholars. Its submissions calls invite scholars and legal practitioners to submit original work on topics relating to Chinese law, or other legal issues that pertain to China.

Publication, printing and databases

The Review is published biannually. Tsinghua's description records that it was printed in the United States and distributed to law libraries, legal scholars and other subscribers in the United States, China and around the world; its 2023 submissions call likewise states that over the preceding decade it had published carefully selected scholarly articles and notes biannually in the United States. Print distribution to law libraries was the channel through which a Beijing student journal entered the standard reference collections of foreign law schools.

Digital distribution followed and then overtook print. The law school's earlier description had looked forward to availability through services such as Westlaw, LexisNexis and HeinOnline; by the time of the 2023 call, the Review could state that its articles are included in HeinOnline, LexisNexis, Westlaw, vLex and ChinaLawInfo. The school's report of the tenth-anniversary symposium likewise notes inclusion in reputable law databases including HeinOnline, LexisNexis and Lexis China. Since 2016, the Review has also been indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). Together, those listings place a Tsinghua student publication inside the research tools that lawyers and scholars outside China actually use.

Submissions and the Tsinghua China Law Award

The Review's 2023 submissions call, for Volume 15, Issue 2, published in July 2023, invited academic articles of between 10,000 and 20,000 words by scholars and legal practitioners, submitted through Scholastica or by email. Alongside full articles, the Review's published output includes notes, and its calls over the years have covered the shorter forms familiar from American law reviews — essays, comments and book reviews — within the same China-law remit.

The Review has also used a prize to draw work on current reform. It established the Tsinghua China Law Award for Excellence in Academic Research to promote global academic discussion of China's legal reforms, dedicating its spring issue to research on current developments in China's rule of law and legal reform. Starting from 2016, the best five essays submitted each year were to be honoured by the award and published in the spring issue, with other high-quality submissions publishable at the Review's discretion. The award turned the journal from a passive recipient of manuscripts into an active solicitor of work on the questions it most wanted covered.

The tenth-anniversary symposium of 2018

On 8 September 2018, the Review celebrated the tenth anniversary of its establishment with a symposium titled "China's Role Under the Globalization of the Rule of Law" at Tsinghua University. The dean of Tsinghua Law School, Professor Weixing Shen, and vice dean Professor Guobin Cui participated, together with renowned scholars from Australia, China, the United States and the United Kingdom. The law school's report described the founding of the Review as demonstrating Tsinghua Law School's remarkable effort in promoting legal education reform, and the Review by then as one of the most influential English-language law reviews in Asia.

The symposium's sessions showed the Review's range. One session addressed Chinese and American public perceptions of property and intellectual property rights, including work on blockchain technology's functions for intellectual property purposes; another addressed the shift in China's approach to the international legal order, the debate over the Belt and Road Initiative and infrastructure investment and loan standards, and the relationship between the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative. An essay growing out of the symposium, on the role of public perception in the rule of law, opened Volume 11, Number 1 in 2019. Intellectual property, international order and China's overseas investment — the subjects on which Chinese law most directly meets the world — were the anniversary themes.

Position among English-language law journals in China

English-language legal periodicals produced inside mainland Chinese law schools remain few, and the Tsinghua China Law Review's claim to priority is specific: the first student-run, English-language journal of legal scholarship published by a mainland Chinese university. The Peking University Law Journal, founded later and edited by faculty rather than students, is its closest Beijing counterpart, and library guides to Chinese law routinely list the Tsinghua and Peking titles together as the core English sources on Chinese law produced in China itself.

The Review's durability is part of its record. Founded by LL.M. students in the fall of 2008, publishing from May 2009, reaching its fifteenth volume in 2023, indexed in ESCI since 2016 and carried by HeinOnline, LexisNexis, Westlaw, vLex and ChinaLawInfo, it has sustained the American-style student law review — an institution that depends on successive cohorts of student editors — inside a Chinese law school for well over a decade. For scholars, judges, lawyers and students outside China who need sustained, footnoted analysis of Chinese law in English, the Tsinghua China Law Review remains one of the few such sources edited where the law it studies is made.