On the evening of December 5, 2025, a lecture themed "Legal Paper Writing: Consciousness and Methodology" was successfully held in the Xingmin Building 338 Lecture Hall on the Xianlin Campus of Nanjing Normal University. The lecture featured Professor Lei Lei, the Qian Duansheng Chair Professor and doctoral supervisor at China University of Political Science and Law, as the keynote speaker. It was chaired by Vice Dean Chen Hui of the School of Law at Nanjing Normal University, with Professor Yuan Yong participating in the discussion. Students from all grades of the School of Law actively participated, creating a strong academic atmosphere on site.

Professor Lei Lei systematically analyzed the three types of consciousness that must be possessed in writing legal papers. Regarding problem consciousness, he pointed out that research needs to make a leap from "theme" to "problem" and then focus on "difficult problems". He also reminded researchers to guard against the "straw man fallacy" and the "category fallacy", emphasizing that academic disputes must be on the same level for effective dialogue to take place. In terms of stance consciousness, Professor Lei Lei clearly distinguished between descriptive legal theory and normative legal theory. The former "states the facts" from the observer's perspective, while the latter is committed to "constructing ideals" from the participant's perspective, proposing standards for evaluating and guiding practice. This distinction helps researchers clarify their own research perspectives and tasks. Regarding argumentation consciousness, Professor Lei Lei broke it down into three levels: empirical argumentation aims to observe and describe the real and effective laws (practices) and jurisprudence, forming the basis of argumentation; the core task of analytical argumentation lies in defining the objects to be dealt with in the paper at the conceptual and logical levels, enabling effective discussion and research; evaluative argumentation is to defend or criticize specific legal systems or jurisprudential propositions, requiring argumentation based on specific rational evaluation criteria.
Immediately after, Professor Lei Lei elaborated on the methods of thesis writing from the perspectives of writing process and thesis structure, transforming the aforementioned abstract writing awareness into specific practical guidance. He first emphasized the importance of systematic literature search and collation as the foundation for research, introduced methods for obtaining and utilizing literature, and suggested that based on reading literature, one should identify the appropriate "problem" and collect and extract subsequent literature according to the determined framework while refining the framework. In addition, it is necessary to pay attention to recording one's own thoughts at any time during the process of accumulating materials. Then, using the metaphor of "laying out the pieces," he briefly and clearly explained the writing essentials of each core part of the thesis, from the title that needs to accurately reflect the core issue, the highly concise abstract, the keywords that serve as retrieval functions, the main body structured around the introduction, body, and conclusion sections, to the final references and other content. He outlined a complete and standardized academic writing roadmap for students, from preparation to completion.