Warwick Law School News

Seven Warwick Law School colleagues recently attended the first Warwick Law Week at Southwest University of Political Science and Law (SWUPL) in Chongqing, China.

The event, which took place from 21 to 25 September 2026 included multiple teaching sessions, the SWUPL–Warwick Joint Law Forum one-day conference, and PhD roundtable discussions.

Each Warwick academic delivered two or three teaching sessions on particular themes to enthusiastic undergraduate or postgraduate students. Topics included corporate governance (Andrew Johnston); economic analysis of law (David Gindis); economic and social rights (Rebecca Munro); arbitration (Velimir Zivkovic); artificial intelligence and intellectual property (Luminita Olteanu); dispute resolution in contracts (Fatma Arslan); corruption, law and development (George Meszaros). Each Warwick academic was paired with a Chinese counterpart who presented a paper on a similar theme. The presentations led to interesting discussions between the two groups.

Six PhD students had travelled from Warwick, and five from SWUPL took part in the roundtable discussions in which students answered questions and expanded on their research. The roundtables focused on corporate governance from a comparative-law perspective, and global AI governance.

For six of the Warwick academics in attendance, it was their first visit to China, and they thoroughly enjoyed learning more about the people and their culture.

Warwick Law Week was conceived by Professor Andrew Johnston of Warwick Law School and Professor Li Mankui of SWUPL. Many people at SWUPL helped make it happen, including Ju Yiya, Bai Yuanyuan and Luo Can. Six SWUPL academics took part in the conference on 22^nd September. PhD students, led by Wang Yurui, acted as assistants to the visiting Warwick academics, while other postgraduate students helped with the organisation. The University of Warwick is very grateful to SWUPL for the work involved in hosting the week, for the assistance and accommodation it provided, and for welcoming the Warwick academics in the finest Chinese style. The visiting academics are also grateful to Warwick Law School for funding their travel. They all hope to return.

The Future

The two universities involved signed a partnership agreement back in 2025 which provides for exchanges of visiting scholars, progression of SWUPL students onto Warwick LLM programmes, and other collaborations, including PhD student exchanges.

Now that academics from the two institutions have had the chance to get to know one another better, we anticipate visiting scholars will join us at Warwick from SWUPL in the next year or two. There have also been promising discussions about possible PhD student exchanges. Many of the Warwick academics are also keen to return to SWUPL to teach.