Professor Wenhua SHAN, Dean of XJTU School of Law, a 1000Plan Chair Professor and MOE “Changjiang Scholar” Chair Professor, acts as the Director of the SRIICL. Prof. James Crawford, a MOE “Changjiang Scholar” Chair Professor at XJTU and Member of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), holds the Honorary Directorship. The SRIICL has 6 full professors, 3 associate professors and 10 lecturers, including 1 1000Plan Chair Professor, 2 MoE “Changjiang Scholar” Chair Professors, 2 awardees of MoE “New Century Excellent Talents”, 1 awardee of Shaanxi Provincial “Hundred Young Talents”, 3 XJTU Tengfei Distinguished Professors and numerous 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.

The SRIICL houses the editorial office of The Chinese Journal of Comparative Law (The CJCL). The CJCL 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 is well equipped with a first-class international and comparative law library. The library has more than 4,000 English titles on international and comparative law. Since 2013, it receives an annual fund of RMB 700,000 for online legal resources.

Under the directorship of Prof. Wenhua SHAN, SRIICL researchers have been undertaking substantial studies on the rule of law on the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB). The SRIICL is the leading research institute in this area nationwide, with 1 national grand research project, 1 national key research project and 1 Shaanxi provincial key research project. Since 2013, the SRIICL team headed by Prof. Wenhua SHAN has been undertaking “Research on the Legal Framework Facilitating Trade and Investment on the Silk Road Economic Belt”, a key research project funded by Shaanxi Social Sciences Fund. In 2014, the team’s application entitled “Studies on the Promotion of the Silk Road Economic Belt Building” was granted grand research project by the MOE. The research, in which policy and law are regarded as the basis and economy and culture as the purpose, provides a general framework for the promotion of the Silk Road Economic Belt Building. In the same year, a research team led by Prof. Jiangyu WANG was granted a key research project for its application entitled “Research on Silk Road Economic Belt Building and China’s Opening Strategies” by the China Social Sciences Fund.