Initially established in 1989, the department of criminal justice changed its name into the School of Criminal Justice upon the approval from the Shanghai Bureau of Justice in April 2011. The School has aimed at serving the needs of society, by drawing on various resources of the field, and has nurtured and supplied many practitioners to the politics-legal field. It has created an innovative path of development with its own characteristics, and supplied many excellent graduates to society.

The School has three divisions, including Criminology (Counter-terrorism), Criminal Law, and Practical Training Center. It has around 900 undergraduate students and 200 graduate students currently enrolled in the major of law (criminal justice). The School consists of 21 teaching staff, including 4 professors and 10 associate professors. Among them, Prof. Li YAN serves as the vice president of the Chinese Society of Criminology, and he is the recipient of the State Council Special Allowance. Prof. Jianlong YAO is the fellow of Ten Outstanding Young Persons in Shanghai, Ten Distinguished Young Jurists in Shanghai, and Shanghai Shuguang Scholar. Other staff have served in a number of societies and associations such as the National Association of Juvenile Delinquency Prevention, the National Association of Prison Study, Shanghai Association of Criminal Law, and Shanghai Association of Anti-drug Law.

In recent years, the School has made substantive progress in both teaching and research. In total, it has succeeded in obtaining nearly 20 grants from the National Social Science Fund and other research funding bodies at the provincial or ministry level. It witnesses the publication of books and monographs and over 600 journal articles, and the School has received many awards from the national or provincial agencies. Meanwhile, the School is under agreement with dozens of courts and procuratorates, and has sent teaching staff to serve as the deputy attorney-in-chief at the district’s procuratorates. It has built international cooperation with many universities and colleges in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Hungary, and India.