The Center for Research on Transnational Law (“CTL”) was established at the Peking University School of Transnational Law in 2010. Prof. Francis Snyder is the Director of CTL.

CTL is the first university based research center, not only in China, but in the whole of the Asia-Pacific Region that is dedicated to the study of Transnational Law. The increasing interest in Transnational Law reflects the growing interaction among national, regional, and international legal norms and processes as well as the rising importance of non-state actors for cross-border transactions and the making and application of rules as a result of enhanced economic globalization, especially in the past two decades. International and regional economic integration and trade, the information technology and communications revolution, the internationalization and fragmentation of production, and the increasing movement of goods, people and services, intellectual property, and investment have created new regulatory needs and posed challenges to traditional legal thinking and categorizations of law, legal institutions, and legal processes. There is a rapidly expanding interaction between national and regional legal systems and international law as well as among national and regional legal systems themselves in spite of their often quite different legal traditions. International legal, economic and social integration has contributed to reshaping national and regional law and legal processes. It has become increasingly difficult to differentiate between public and private law in transnational legal processes. There is also more and more overlap between public international law and private international law (including conflicts of law). Transnational Law serves as a concept to overcome the traditional limitations of perspective in legal scholarship and policy research.