Jaclyn 

NEO

A graduate of NUS Faculty of Law and Yale Law School, Jaclyn is scholar of comparative constitutional law as well as law and religion in Asia. She also has an emerging research interest in access to justice issues in Singapore.

Jaclyn is a recipient of multiple academic scholarships from NUS, including the NUS Overseas-Graduate Scholarship. During her time at Yale Law School, where she completed her Master of Laws and her Doctor of the Science of Law (JSD), Jaclyn co-founded the JSD program’s now flagship Annual Doctoral Scholarship Conference and the Yale Law School’s Debating Law and Religion series. Jaclyn is a principal investigator and co-principal investigator of multiple competitive research grants from the Ministry of Education, the Singapore Judicial College, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin-NUS Joint Project, and the NUS Law-Melbourne Law School Research Partnership. She has received awards for her scholarship. Her article on domestic incorporation of international human rights law in a dualist state won the Asian Yearbook of International Law’s DILA International Law Prize. In 2017, in recognition of her research on religious freedom in Southeast Asia, she was awarded the SHAPE-SEA Research Award.

Jaclyn has published in leading journals in her field, including the International Journal of Constitutional Law (I-CON), the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, and the Asian Journal of Comparative Law. She is editor/co-editor of multiple volumes, including the Constitutional Interpretation in Singapore: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2017), Pluralist Constitutions in Southeast Asia (Hart, 2019), Regulating Religion in Asia: Norms, Modes, and Challenges (CUP 2019), Constitutional Change in Singapore: Reforming the Singapore Elected Presidency (Routledge, 2019), and Religious Offences in Common Law Asia: Colonial Legacies, Constitutional Rights and Contemporary Practice (Hart, 2020). She has also served as guest editor for the Singapore Academy of Law Journal, Journal of Law, Religion, and State, Journal of Comparative Law, Journal of International and Comparative Law, and the Asian Journal of Law and Society. Her work has been cited by the courts in Singapore and by the Supreme Court of India. Her co-authored monograph on Litigants in Person in Singapore will be published by Singapore Academy of Law Publishing in 2021.

Jaclyn currently sits on the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Comparative Law, the International Journal of Constitutional Law Blog (ICONnect), the Journal of Law and Religion, Revista de Investigações Constitucionais (Journal of Constitutional Research), and Suprema – Revista de Estudos Constitucionais (International Board). She is a contributing editor to Jotwell, the Journal of Things We Like (Lots).

Jaclyn has held visiting positions at the Cluster of Excellence ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’ at Frankfurt University, University of Münster, University of Trento, Melbourne Law School (as a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Fellow with the ARC Laureate Project in Comparative Constitutional Law), the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, as well as the Princeton School of Public Policy and International Affairs.

Jaclyn has been invited to serve on multiple international committees including the program committee of the Law and Religion Section of the Association for American Law Schools (AALS) and the Organizing Committee, Younger Scholars Forum, International Academy of Comparative Law (IACL) (2016-2018). She is an elected Council Member of the International Society for Public Law (ICON-S), and is founding co-chair of the Singapore chapter of ICON-S. She sits on the inaugural International Advisory Board of the University of Otago’s Centre for Law and Society and will be a Steering Committee Member of the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law (CCTL).

Jaclyn was appointed Director of the Centre for Asian Legal Studies in January 2020 and serves on the Advisory Board of the NUS Victim Care Unit. She maintains a strong connection to the legal profession and sits on the Singapore Academy of Law’s Law Reform Committee and the Executive Committee of the ASEAN Law Association (Singapore). In February 2020, she was appointed Professorial Fellow to the Singapore Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) Academy.

Jaclyn shares more information on her publications here: https://www.jaclynneo.com/.

• Constitutional Law, Institutions, Constitutional Theory, Constitutional Norms
• State & Religion, Constitutional Models, Religious Freedom