The Silk Road Institute for International and Comparative Law (SRIICL), formally established as the Silk Road Institute for International Law in 2006 and renamed in 2008, is committed to the promotion of the rule of law and the creation of an “innovative, excellent, open, and harmonious” research environment. As one of the key social sciences research centres at Xi’an Jiaotong University (XJTU), the SRIICL serves as the major platform for XJTU Outstanding International Legal Personnel Education Centre, one of the 22 national centres of this kind in China, and XJTU Collaborative Innovation Centre for Silk Road Economic Belt Studies (CIC-SREBS).
Professor Wenhua SHAN, Dean of XJTU School of Law, Chair Professor, acts as the Director of the SRIICL. Prof. James Crawford, Chair Professor at XJTU and Member of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), holds the Honorary Directorship. The SRIICL has 10 full professors, 6 associate professors and 7 lecturers, including 2 Chair Professors, 3 awardees of “New Century Excellent Talents”, 1 awardee of Shaanxi Provincial “Hundred Young Talents”, 2 XJTU Tengfei Distinguished Professors and 2 foreign teachers. Key members of the SRIICL have all obtained PhD degree from renowned domestic and foreign universities and some of them had held senior academic positions overseas. In addition, the SRIICL has appointed several world leading scholars as Marco Polo Fellows, such as Professor Jürgen Basedow, Secretary General of International Academy of Comparative Law (IACL) and Director of Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, and Meg Kinnear, Secretary General of International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), and several outstanding Chinese scholars as Zheng He Fellows, such as H.E. Jielong Duan and H.E. Huikang HUANG, both former Director-General of the Department of Treaty and Law of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and H.E. Yuejiao ZHANG, Member of the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Through several years’ efforts, the SRIICL has gradually established international influence in some fields, such as International Investment Law, International Trade Law, International Commercial Law, Resources, Energy and Environmental Law and Space Law. SRIICL researchers have published 6 English monographs and edited collections with international publishers such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, BRILL/Martinus Nijhoff, Hart Publishing, and Routledge, and dozens of research articles on international leading journals such as American Journal of Comparative Law, European Journal of International Law, ICSID Review, Journal of World Trade, Cambridge Law Journal, The Modern Law Review, and Cornell Journal of International Law. Moreover, they have chaired over 50 significant international and domestic research projects supported by the IACL, the OUP, the EU, the UK Jurist Association, the National Social Science Fund, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Commerce, and the Ministry of Justice. In particular, the SRIICL leads the country in the area of Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) studies, with one national grand research project, one national key research project and a few Shaanxi provincial key research projects. On 22 January 2015, the MOFCOM-Shaanxi-XJTU Collaborative Innovation Centre for Silk Road Economic Belt Studies (CIC-SREBS) led by the SRIICL was officially launched, with support from SDRC and MFA, among others.
The SRIICL houses the editorial office of The Chinese Journal of Comparative Law (The CJCL). The CJCL, which was selected into ESCI Database in 2017, is the first comprehensive English law journal jointly established by the OUP and the Chinese academia, and also the first international professional journal on Comparative Law published under the auspices of the IACL. It also holds Silk Road International Workshop Series on International Economic Law, a MoE & SAFEA University Featured Program, in which world-renowned scholars and professors of International Economic Law are invited to give lectures to participants recruited from worldwide. It aims to hold “high-level, internationalized, open-ended, and serialized” workshops on International Economic Law on a regular basis and provide a learning platform for young scholars, lawyers and governmental staffs.
The SRIICL maintains close links with leading international law centres such as the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL) at the University of Cambridge. A "Silk Road Scholar Scheme" in particular was established with the LCIL to foster mutual exchange of young scholars. The SRIICL is well equipped with a first-class international and comparative law library, with more than 5,000 English titles on international and comparative law and an annual fund of RMB 700,000 for online legal resources.
Contact :
Address： Room 1003 Main Building, No. 28 Xianning West Road, Xi'an, Shaanxi, P.R.C;
Tel/Fax: 029-82664484;
Email: sriicl@xjtu.edu.cn