Faculty Scholarship Highlights

Peking University Law School is committed to fostering academic innovation and bridging research with practice, bringing Chinese legal scholarship to a global audience. 2025 also saw the release of several influential academic books by our own faculty members, including three in English language that we are pleased to highlight below.

 

Basic Theories of Intellectual Property Transaction

 

About the Editor:

Professor  YANG Ming is Tenured Associate Professor at Peking University Law School, specializing in intellectual property law, competition law, and cyberlaw.

About the Book:

Starting from the principles of the entitlement of intellectual property, this book tries to reveal the institutional implication of the creation of right, the boundary of right and the attribute of right. And, this book also tries to sort out the matching attribute between the existing intellectual property systems and the operation of the intellectual property market. Finally, by analyzing the correlation between the market environment and the subject's behavior choice, this book tries to clarify the internal logic between "system," "market" and "behavior." These aforesaid features will help IP researchers deeply understand how existing legal systems and rules affect specific intellectual property transactions.

 

Online Dispute Resolution in China: Institutional Analysis and Legal Practice

 

About the Editor:

Professor GAO Wei is Tenured Associate Professor at Peking University Law School, specializing in international commercial arbitration law, private international law, international economic law, and internet governance.

About the Book:

This book provides an up-to-date and comprehensive institutional analysis of online dispute resolution (ODR), with a focus on the developments in China as well as their doctrinal and practical implications globally. In the book, a wide range of ODR mechanisms, including online arbitration, online litigation, online mediation, crowdsourced ODR, and blockchain escrow services and more, are thoroughly examined and compared through an original analytical framework that highlights the evolutionary trajectories of dispute resolution in the digital era. The author leverages several empirical studies and her experience working with the Supreme People’s Court on formulating the rules for online courts. She presents an insightful, panoramic overview of ODR practices across Chinese courts, arbitration commissions, and online businesses, including detailed case studies and critical analyses of major digital platforms such as Taobao and the internet courts, which informs not only a new conception of justice adapted to the internet society but also different developmental paths for both established and emerging methods of ODR. This book will appeal to scholars, practitioners and policymakers with an interest in online dispute resolution, online courts, law and technology, as well as digital platforms and the internet economy.

Civil Judgments at First Glance: Comparative Experience and Chinese Solution

 

About the Editor:

Professor CAO Zhixun is Tenured Associate Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at Peking University Law School, specializing in civil procedure law, evidence law, enforcement law, dispute resolution (including commercial arbitration), interdisciplinary research on civil law and civil procedure law, comparative law, and judicial systems (covering Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, etc.).

About the Book:

This monograph is on first-instance civil judgments in China from a Chinese proceduralist in global context. I hope it may contribute a little bit for foreigners to understanding the Chinese civil justice and civil judgments.

Judgments, as the final judicial products which affect the legal relationship between both parties or even multiple parties, provide desirable objects to observe and can evaluate the service of judicial proceedings and the protection of parties’ procedural rights. And since judgments are in most cases regarded as the default termination of any civil litigation, there is no need to argue for a comparative study on this topic which has already inspired Chinese doctrines and the newest reforms. One of the aims of such research is to modernize Chinese civil justice considering the experience of leading legal counterparts.

Next to the theoretical analysis, this book intends to introduce empirical data in China to the English literature, which could provide a vivid illustration for legal researchers to be better informed about the Chinese legal system and its version of rule of law. In other words, this monograph would like to describe the real judicial practice in China and summarize how Chinese lawyers understand and facilitate the production of civil judgments.

As discussed in numerous places through this contribution, it is believed that the more established legal research with Chinese characteristics should be based on the typical practice and common understanding in Chinese context. And the expected research should go further to locate the functional difference between Chinese practice and comparative experience and inquire whether the procedural safeguards for realizing substantive rights in China have reached the extent consistent with the requirements according to principles of civil procedure. On one hand, the proceduralists have to discover the real situation of the typical foreign legal experience. On the other hand, it is necessary to well prepare for a set of more systematic procedural rules with clearly identified elements, and incorporate the discussion on procedural ideology into the interpretation of current legal institutions.