Abstract: As there has not been a paper concerning “constitutional review of local regulations” published in the legal circle, this paper makes a detailed study and analysis of this issue from the three perspectives of China’s legislative theory, system and practice, and points out that the real reason behind this academic phenomenon is that the legislative system of local regulations designed by China’s current constitution, organizational law and legislation law is very complicated, and the system oflegislative supervision over local regulations has too many levels, including constitutionality review, legality review and review of consistency with administrative regulations and local regulations and review of consistency with local government regulations, with overlapping procedures and mechanisms of legislative supervision．The legislative supervision principle of “subordinate law obeying superior law” established in the current LegislationLaw can easily lead to a situation in the practice of legislative supervision in which constitutional review of local regulations is sidestepped by legality review and review ofcompliance with local regulations．This paper also studies and analyzes the jurisprudential and institutional issues in the examination of the legality and constitutionality of local regulations in “Luoyang Seed Case in Henan Province”, “Qilianshan Report Case” and “the Case of Supervision over the Infringement on CitizensPrivacy by Road Traffic Regulations”,and suggests that China should simply the system design of the constitutionality examination of local regulations under the current LegislationLaw to limit the scope of application of the legislative supervision principle of “subordinate law obeying superior law”, further rationalize the logical relationships between the Constitution and local regulations and between laws and local regulations and, on the above basis, establish a legislative supervision procedure that can really enable the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress to conduct scientific and effective constitutional review of local regulations．

Keywords: local regulations; review of constitutionality; review of legality; review of consistency with administrative regulations and local regulations; review of consistency with local government regulations

The author of this article is a research fellow at and the director of Institute of International Law, Chinese Academy of Social Science. This article is published in the Journal of Shanxi Normal University (Social Science Edition) 4 (2020).