Jaclyn Neo to lead Centre for Asian Legal Studies with Arif Jamal from 2020

NUS Law is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Jaclyn Neo ’03 has been appointed as the new Director of the Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS) at NUS Law, starting 1 January 2020. Associate Professor Arif Jamal will also assume the position of Deputy Director of the Centre at the same time.

Jaclyn is a graduate of NUS Law and Yale Law School. She is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of comparative constitutional law whose work has brought Asian law to the forefront of scholarship in that area. She is an elected Council Member of the International Society for Public Law (ICON-S), and is the first academic from Southeast Asia to be elected to the Council. Jaclyn also sits on the Singapore Law Society’s Public and International Law Committee as well as the Singapore Academy of Law’s Law Reform Committee. Besides having won research awards for her academic work, Jaclyn has also been cited by the Singapore courts as well as the Supreme Court of India.

Arif works in the areas of law and religion, comparative law, and Muslim legal traditions, especially with reference to political theory and law. His publications include a monograph titled Islam, Law and the Modern State: (Re)imagining Liberal Theory in Muslim Contexts (Routledge, 2018; paperback 2020), as well as a range of book chapters and journal articles. Arif has served on the Executive Committee of CALS for the past several years as well as on the Board of the Asian Journal of Comparative Law. Arif holds degrees from McGill University, the University of Toronto, SOAS, and did his PhD at UCL Law.

Speaking about the transition, Jaclyn said, “Since the launch of CALS in 2012, the Centre has benefitted from exceptional leadership, first under Andrew Harding and Wang Jiangyu, and subsequently under Dan Puchniak and Chen Weitseng. My vision is to build on these foundations and for CALS to establish itself as a research centre of excellence in Singapore, which would serve as a major research and knowledge hub for comparative Asian legal studies.”

Under its new leadership, CALS will embark on a variety of initiatives.

The first is the launch of a research cluster of ‘Comparative Civil Law in Asia’, which extends CALS’s research agenda into comparative studies of civil law. This new cluster, to be helmed by Assistant Professor Christian Hofmann LLM ’13 and Associate Professor Chen Weitseng, supplements the three existing clusters on Law and Religion in Asia, Comparative Public Law in Asia, and Comparative Commercial Law in Asia.

Secondly, CALS will be partnering the International Association of Constitutional Law (IACL-AIDC) and Melbourne Law School’s Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies, to launch the IACL-AIDC’s inaugural Junior Scholars Forum at NUS Law in July 2020.

Finally, CALS will host several major research conferences in the coming year, including one on Constitutional Amendment and Legitimacy (in collaboration with The University of Texas-Austin) and another on 150 Years of the Indian Contract Act (in collaboration with Melbourne Law School and Jindal Global Law School).