Law School of Shanghai University is a law school of new style which cultivates persons specializing in financial laws, intellectual property rights and international trade laws. Its predecessor can be traced back to Law Department of Branch School of Fudan University resuming its enrollment in 1978. Thereupon there have been several times of amalgamations and splits. In March 2005, through restructuring schools and departments by Shanghai University the former Intellectual Property School was united into the newly planed and organized Law School. And professor Wangweiguo, a renowned jurist and the president of School of Civil and Commercial and Economic Law of China Politics and Law, was engaged as its part-time president. At the same time, the newly founded Law School has regrouped and augmented its teaching staff and has marched forward to a new flight of step.

The school sets up three teaching systems- Intellectual Property School, Department of Financial Law and Law Department and six scientific research institutes-Civil and Commercial Law Research Center, Intellectual Property Research Institute, Research Center for Economic Law and Financial Law, Law Institute, Research Center for Criminal Law and Crime and Research Center for Adult Legal Education. Its teaching and scientific research staff totals 50 persons.

The school offers financial law specialty, intellectual property specialty, international trade law specialty, criminal justice specialty etc for undergraduate students. Besides, the school has been permitted to offer master's degree education in jurisprudence, science of constitutional and administrative law and criminal jurisprudence. At present it is applying to be a master's degree granting body of the primary discipline of jurisprudence and is applying for the authority to confer master's degree in civil and commercial law and economic law with the purpose of striving to create a research-oriented school with quite complete research categories and outstanding research emphases.

The teaching staff of this school consists of seven full-time professors, five part-time professors, ten associate professors and more than thirty lecturers and assistant professors. Among them more than thirty teachers has obtained their doctor or master's degree and their average age reaches forty years old. In recent years, relying mainly on its teachers, the school has won many research projects at the national and provincial level and research topics about the enactment of the local administrative rules and regulations. In addition, scientific researches are becoming the major drive for teaching and cultivating undergraduate and graduate students.

The school lays particular emphasis on the teaching and learning style which link theories with practice and pay much attention to combining passing on skills and knowledge of special fields with imparting legal knowledge so as to cultivate students to become composite talents who both understand the technical businesses in special fields and grasp the related legal knowledge with the final aim of cultivating pillars of economic construction and backbones of legal society. The school spreads many practical teaching methods such as case method, the method of mock prosecution, defenses confrontation and argument, the method of simulating the legal practices of investment and enterprise merger, the method of mocking criminal and civil trials etc with the purpose of exercising students' ability to grasp and apply the learned knowledge. The school also focuses on developing students' basic qualities of Chinese and English listening, speaking, reading, writing and dialogue, communication and speech. All these will lay foundations for students' adapting to future job positions.

The school attaches importance to academic research and disciplinary construction and focuses on cultivating students' ability of using law knowledge to think and analyze problems. By conducting speech competitions, debates and trial activities of imitating courts, it aims to foster students' agile mind, train their eloquence, and improve their proficiency in a foreign language. The school engages some famous scholars at home and abroad as part-time professors and invites foreign experts here for teaching and academic exchange from time to time. For ages it has made many achievements in teaching and scientific research and also exerted a considerable social influence.