On the afternoon September 18, 2018, aninternal seminar on the Draft Amendment to the Forest Law was held at the Ecological Law Department of CASS Law Institute.At the seminar, Professor Liu Hongtao, the head of the Department, gave an introduction to background of the revision of the Forest Law. Then the researchers of the department carried out heated discussions on the concrete institutional design and stipulationsof amendment relating to such matters asthe legislative purpose of the amendment, the legal principles, the responsibilities of the relevant government departments, the Tree-Planting Day, the mechanism for the resolution of forest disputes, the relationship of the forest law with transfer payments for national key ecological functional areas, the relationship between the ownership and the real right for usufruct of forest, financing guarantee, forestry development planning, criterion for the designation of public interest forest, disaster prevention and reliefemergency response, temporary occupation of forest land and restoration afterward the use, management of forest, and afforestation. After carrying out article-by-article discussion on the draft amendment, the participants of the seminar reached consensuses on the following issue: the status of the Forest Law as a special legislation on natural resources; the interpretation of legal terms, especially the three core concepts of “forest”, “forest land” and “forest tree”; and the design of the forest resource protection system.At the end of the seminar, the participants agreed that they would continue to closely follow the revision of the Forest Law, carry out in-depth study of the related theoretical and practical issues, and,on the basis of this study, form and submit to the legislative organsa relatively mature opinions on the revision of the lawsome construction countermeasures on the construction of ecological legal system in China.