About Peking University Law Journal

Peking University Law Journal

The Peking University Law Journal is an English-language, peer-reviewed law journal associated with Peking University Law School in Beijing, established in 2013. It is edited by faculty members of Peking University and is now published by Taylor & Francis, appearing on the publisher's platform under the journal code rplj20, with print ISSN 2051-7483 and electronic ISSN 2052-5907, on a semiannual schedule. Its stated aim, in the publisher's words, is to provide a window on Chinese law for anyone interested in the continuing development of Chinese law and society. Where the Tsinghua China Law Review — its Beijing counterpart — is a student-run American-style law review, the Peking University Law Journal is a faculty-edited scholarly journal, created to carry the legal scholarship of one of China's leading law schools to readers who do not read Chinese.

The need the journal addresses is stated at the head of its own aims. In the three decades following China's rapid economic development, the journal notes, China became one of the world's most prosperous countries while also trying to construct a state administered under the rule of law; Chinese and foreign scholars made increased efforts to understand the Chinese state and Chinese society and their relationship to contemporary Chinese law, but those efforts had not made Chinese law sufficiently accessible to the outside world. The journal exists to close that gap.

Launch in 2013 and the publisher history

The journal was established in 2013. Library catalogue records for the title record it as published by Hart Publishing from 2013 — Hart being the Oxford-based legal publisher — and the launch-era description of the journal, preserved in the candidate record for this profile, presented it in association with Peking University Law School as a vehicle for English versions of leading scholarship from Zhongwai Faxue, Peking University's flagship Chinese journal of comparative and foreign law, alongside original English contributions. At least some early content did appear in parallel in the two journals: an article on multiple modernities and China's private law, by Gunther Teubner with Chunyi Qi, appeared in English in Volume 1 of the Peking University Law Journal in 2013, with its Chinese version in Zhongwai Faxue in the same year.

The publisher history did not stand still. Peking University Law School's own site now describes the journal as a peer-reviewed English-language journal published by Taylor & Francis and edited by faculty members of Peking University, and elsewhere records that the law school cooperated with the internationally renowned publishing house Routledge — the Taylor & Francis imprint — to publish the Peking University Law Journal, regularly introducing the latest achievements of Chinese law to the international academic community. The journal's current home is accordingly Taylor & Francis Online. Readers should therefore distinguish the launch arrangement recorded in library catalogues from the present one: Hart Publishing at the 2013 launch, Taylor & Francis and Routledge in the journal's current presentation.

A window on Chinese law: aims and authorship

The journal's aims, as stated by Taylor & Francis, are precise about both audience and authorship. In pursuing its aim of providing a window on Chinese law, the journal publishes original English-language articles written by Chinese and foreign scholars on Chinese legal traditions and on the rule of law in Chinese society. It also publishes original English-language articles which engage comparatively with Chinese law and the rule of law in China. The journal is thus not a translation digest alone: original English work, by scholars inside and outside China, stands alongside scholarship carried over from the Chinese-language debate.

That double character matters for how the journal can be used. A foreign reader following, for example, Chinese debates over criminal punishment or judicial reform can read in one journal both Chinese scholars presenting their own research in English and foreign scholars analysing Chinese law comparatively — the two perspectives between which understanding of a legal system is usually built. Peking University Law School's site makes the same point institutionally, crediting the English journal with outstanding contributions to the development of Chinese law to the world, within a school that attaches great importance to promoting its research overseas.

Faculty editing and double-anonymised peer review

Unlike a student law review, the Peking University Law Journal is edited by faculty members of Peking University. Its peer-review arrangements are those of a conventional scholarly journal. Taylor & Francis states that all submitted manuscripts are subject to initial appraisal by the editor and, if found suitable for further consideration, to peer review by independent, anonymous expert referees; all peer review is double anonymised — double-blind — and submission is by email to the journal's editorial office at Peking University Law School. The journal's instructions also note that it publishes manuscripts in English only and accepts original articles, and that Taylor & Francis uses Crossref screening for unoriginal material.

Editorial-board membership reflected the journal's comparative ambitions from the start. The curriculum vitae of Franklin E. Zimring, the Berkeley criminal-justice scholar, records service on the journal's editorial board from 2013, its founding year — consistent with the prominence of criminal law and punishment among the journal's early subjects, discussed below. A board drawing on senior foreign scholars in the journal's fields helped signal to libraries and authors that the new English title met international scholarly conventions.

Place within Peking University Law School

The journal belongs to the large publishing ecosystem of Peking University Law School. The school records that its teachers and students edit some two dozen academic publications, and it has described strengthening the overseas promotion of research with Chinese characteristics, and enhancing the school's international academic reputation, as priorities since 2016 — with the cooperation with Routledge on this journal named as an instrument of that policy, regularly introducing the latest achievements of Chinese law to the international academic community.

The school context also explains the journal's relationship to Zhongwai Faxue. That Chinese journal is the law school's flagship title for comparative and foreign law, and the English journal was conceived in association with the same school and, at launch, in relation to that flagship's scholarship. The pairing mirrors a pattern at other Beijing law schools in the same period — an established Chinese-language journal of record, and a younger English-language journal built to carry the school's work abroad — but Peking University's version had the advantage of one of China's most cited Chinese law faculties behind it.

Format, frequency and identifiers

Journal references record the Peking University Law Journal as a semiannual — twice-yearly — journal, established in 2013, with print ISSN 2051-7483 and electronic ISSN 2052-5907. Its volumes are numbered from the 2013 launch: Volume 1 appeared in 2013, Volume 2 in 2014, and the sequence continued through Volume 6 in 2018 and beyond, with articles carrying Taylor & Francis digital object identifiers in the journal's later, Routledge-era presentation. The title is held by law libraries as an English source on Chinese law, and its articles are cited in international scholarship on Chinese law — in briefing papers and monographs on Asian criminal justice, among other places — usually by volume, year and page in the ordinary law-journal manner.

Care is needed with the name itself. "Peking University Law Journal" is also the English rendering used for the law school's long-established Chinese-language journal tradition, and the law school lists an English journal and Chinese titles with overlapping translated names among its many publications. The subject of this profile is specifically the English-language journal established in 2013 with the ISSNs given above, published first in association with Hart Publishing and now presented by Taylor & Francis.

Scope: traditions, rule of law and comparative law

The journal's stated subject scope runs from Chinese legal traditions to the contemporary rule of law, with comparative engagement as its characteristic method. In practice its pages have covered the fields the launch description promised — jurisprudence and legal theory, constitutional questions, civil law and private-law modernisation, and comparative law — always with Chinese law at the centre. The Teubner article in the first volume, asking what multiple modernities meant for China's private law and written with a Chinese co-author, is a fair specimen of the genre: a general jurisprudential framework tested against Chinese material, in dialogue with the same debate in Zhongwai Faxue.

Comparative criminal-law scholarship has been a recurring strand. A 2021 article drafted German reflections on the project of a commentary on the Chinese Criminal Code, noting how Chinese criminal-law scholars have built links with colleagues abroad, above all in Germany; another 2021 piece compared Chinese and American jurisprudence on torts and intellectual property in Industry 4.0. The journal's comparative law is thus practical as well as theoretical — concerned with how codes are commented on, how courts reason, and how doctrine travels between China, continental Europe and the United States.

Criminal law, the death penalty and guiding cases

Criminal law provides the clearest view of the journal in operation. In 2014 Jiang Su published "Kill Fewer and Kill Cautiously," a critical review of death-penalty reforms in China, in Volume 2 — an article subsequently cited in international briefing literature on the death penalty and its reduction in Asia, alongside the record of China's reduction of capital offences. The journal later carried empirical work on Chinese public opinion on the death penalty, based on a sample of more than 30,000 respondents, which found that retribution and deterrence formed the main conceptual foundation of public support, and that most respondents were conditional rather than absolute retentionists. Capital punishment — the subject on which Chinese criminal-law scholarship most often meets foreign attention — was treated in the journal both doctrinally and empirically.

The guiding-case system, China's mechanism by which selected judgments guide later courts, received similar treatment. The journal carried "China's Guiding Case System" in 2014 and, in 2018, "The Emergence of Guiding Cases in China" in Volume 6. Together with articles on judicial reform and the new Criminal Procedure Law, on crimes and punishments analysed statistically, and on sentencing, these pieces made the English journal a usable record of how China's courts were changing — written substantially by the Chinese scholars studying that change, rather than only by outside observers.

Readership and significance

The journal addresses, in its own formulation, anyone interested in the continuing development of Chinese law and society: scholars of Chinese and comparative law, lawyers with China-related work, and students for whom Chinese-language journals are inaccessible. Its semiannual, faculty-edited, double-blind-reviewed format gives libraries a stable English title to shelve beside the student-edited Tsinghua China Law Review and the other English law journals produced in Beijing in the same generation, such as Frontiers of Law in China.

Its significance is institutional as much as bibliographic. Peking University Law School set out, as a matter of stated policy, to introduce the latest achievements of Chinese law to the international academic community, and the Peking University Law Journal — launched in 2013 in association with the school, recorded at launch under Hart Publishing, and now published with Routledge and Taylor & Francis — is the journal built for exactly that purpose. For readers tracing how Chinese legal traditions, rule-of-law debates, criminal-law reform and comparative doctrine have been presented to the world in English since 2013, it remains one of the principal windows the journal's founders promised to open.