Haijuan Liu

Haijuan Liu

Oct. 30, 2026

New liberal arts construction, Criminal law teaching, Paradigm transformation, Value rationality, System reconstruction.

Based on the background of new liberal arts construction, this paper is theoretically explored in four dimensions based on the realistic dilemma of criminal law teaching reform in colleges and universities. The research delves deep into the intrinsic disadvantages of traditional criminal law teaching mode in terms closed knowledge structure, rigid method orientation and singular evaluation mechanism, and comprehensively expounds the structural tension between it and the requirement of compound talents with interdisciplinary background under rule of law. The subjective, closed and normative dogma needs to be highly adaptable, however, traditional legal thinking is difficult to adapt to the complexity of new crimes in information age, which caused the severe alienation of legal thinking and social governance practice. In teaching innovation, judicial justice is crucial for preservative. Thus, this paper proposes a value rationality-centered reform path from three aspects: breaking the barriers among disciplines, changing the paradigm of knowledge-filled instillation to competency-based teaching and establishing a diversified open classroom system including driving factors such as curriculum module integration, digital technology empowerment and teacher-student roles reshaping. The deepening reform in the teaching of criminal law is not only the requirement to improve educational connotation, but also the way to cope with national governance modernization and train top-notch innovative legal talents, and finally provide a theoretical foundation or direction orientation for promoting the construction of China’s characteristic legal education system and extensively support a high-quality sustainable development of legal education.

© 2026, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license