About Tsinghua Law Journal

Tsinghua Law Journal

Tsinghua Law Journal is a Chinese-language law review published bimonthly in Beijing by the Law School of Tsinghua University. Its Chinese title is 清华法学 (Qinghua Faxue). It is a CSSCI source journal carrying scholarship across legal theory, constitutional and administrative law, civil and commercial law, criminal law and international law. The journal is the law school's own review — the periodical through which one of China's most prestigious universities publishes legal scholarship under its name — and it should be distinguished from the same law school's English-language, student-run Tsinghua China Law Review, a separate journal with a different purpose and audience.

The distinction is the first thing an accurate profile must establish, because Tsinghua's law publishing is bilingual and dual-track. The Chinese journal is a faculty-grade academic review in the national CSSCI system. The English review, founded in 2008 as the first student-run English-language journal of legal scholarship published by a mainland Chinese university, addresses the world. Tsinghua Law Journal addresses China.

The publishing law school

The journal is published by the Law School of Tsinghua University in Beijing — housed in the university's Mingli Building on the Tsinghua campus in Haidian District. Tsinghua is one of China's two most prestigious universities, historically strongest in engineering and the sciences, whose law school has built a position among the country's leading law faculties and whose scholarship spans the full range of legal disciplines represented in the journal's scope.

A law school's review occupies a particular place in Chinese legal academia. China's elite law journals are a competitive, ranked field — scholarly studies of Chinese legal publishing enumerate the leading titles and measure their peer-review practices, citation performance and share of in-house publication — and a journal bearing the Tsinghua name competes in that company. In published rankings of Chinese law journals, 清华法学 appears in the leading group, listed fourteenth in one multi-scheme comparison of elite titles alongside the journals of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Peking University and Renmin University.

Scope across the legal disciplines

The journal carries scholarship across legal theory, constitutional and administrative law, civil and commercial law, criminal law and international law. That is the full map of a general law review: it is not a specialist journal of one branch, but the comprehensive legal periodical of its university, expected to publish the best work its editors can attract in any branch of law.

The breadth shows in the work its community produces and cites. Tsinghua law scholarship appearing in and around the journal's pages in recent years includes analyses of data property rights and their allocation, originalist constitutional interpretation and its Chinese path, the constitutionality of life imprisonment in Chinese criminal law, the relationship between the object and the claim in civil litigation, the leading role of foreign-relations law in building a foreign-related rule of law, and the WTO Appellate Body crisis in international law. A general review at a comprehensive university is where such work — doctrinal, theoretical and institutional, across every department of the law school — converges.

CSSCI standing

The journal is a source journal of the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI), Nanjing University's selective index of leading Chinese humanities and social-science journals. Among Chinese law reviews, CSSCI membership is the essential mark of elite status: it governs where ambitious scholars submit, what counts in promotion and degree evaluations, and which journals' contents define the discipline's research front.

Legal scholarship on Chinese journal evaluation notes both the power and the pressures of that system — rankings built on quantitative indicators, elite journals' peer-review practices, and the tendency of elite titles to publish substantial shares of in-house work. Tsinghua Law Journal operates inside that evaluated world, and its continued CSSCI presence is the external confirmation of its standing among China's law reviews.

Not the Tsinghua China Law Review

Because confusion between the two Tsinghua titles is common in international databases, the differences deserve a section of their own. The Tsinghua China Law Review (ISSN 2151-8904) is an English-language journal, student-run, established in 2008, dedicated to advancing global academic discussion of issues relating to Chinese law; it has been indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index since 2016 and publishes twice a year. Tsinghua Law Journal (清华法学) is a Chinese-language bimonthly faculty review in the CSSCI system, publishing scholarship across all branches of law for the Chinese legal academy.

Both are published under the law school's name from its Beijing campus, and both are legitimate parts of Tsinghua's legal publishing. But a citation to 清华法学 is a citation to a Chinese CSSCI law review; a citation to the Tsinghua China Law Review is a citation to an English student-edited journal. Researchers and librarians should keep the two bibliographically separate, as Chinese evaluators do.

Frequency and form

The journal is published bimonthly — six issues a year. Bimonthly publication is the standard rhythm of China's major comprehensive law reviews, and it suits a general review's needs: enough issues to cover the branches of law in turn, enough space for the long doctrinal and theoretical articles that are the genre's characteristic form, and a regular presence in the discipline's conversation.

Its form follows the conventions of Chinese legal periodicals: long-form scholarly articles with the apparatus of Chinese legal citation, organised by the journal's editorial office at the law school. The journal's contents are distributed through the Chinese academic database system through which CSSCI journals are read and cited nationwide.

Authors and readership

The journal's authors are legal scholars from Tsinghua's own faculty and from law schools across China, with the mix of in-house and external contribution that studies of Chinese elite journals describe. Its readership is the Chinese legal academy: professors and doctoral candidates in law, judges and practitioners who follow doctrinal scholarship, and the libraries of every serious Chinese law faculty.

For that readership, the journal performs the classic functions of a university law review. It gives its own institution's scholars a home venue of national standing; it gives outside scholars a Tsinghua-branded destination for their best work; and it gives the discipline a recurring, curated sample of what Chinese legal scholarship currently considers important — across theory, public law, private law, criminal law and international law alike.

How the journal is found and cited

In Chinese databases and citation practice, the journal is cited by its Chinese title, 清华法学, with Tsinghua University as its publishing institution and Beijing as its place of publication; its bimonthly issues are distributed nationally through the standard Chinese academic journal channels. International readers encountering the title in English should anchor identification to that Chinese title, because the law school's English-language Tsinghua China Law Review — a different journal, described above — is the title most visible in Western databases, and the two are routinely confused in catalogues that translate loosely.

Properly identified, citations to Tsinghua Law Journal refer to Chinese-language scholarship across the legal disciplines, published under CSSCI evaluation standards. That citation identity — a Tsinghua-branded, bimonthly, comprehensive Chinese law review — is the journal's durable bibliographic signature, independent of the shifting English renderings of its name.

Place in Chinese legal publishing

Chinese legal publishing's top tier comprises the academy journals — such as the Chinese Journal of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences — and the reviews of the great university law schools. Tsinghua Law Journal belongs to the second group, representing a university whose overall prestige is unmatched in China and whose law school has risen with the university's investment in the humanities and social sciences.

Its bimonthly, CSSCI-listed, full-scope format makes it one of the standard citation targets of Chinese legal research. When bibliometric studies rank China's elite law journals, 清华法学 is in the table; when Chinese law professors list where they have published, it is a name that counts. That is the position this profile records: a Beijing university law review, in Chinese, six times a year, carrying the legal scholarship of the Tsinghua name.