On 26 August 2026, more than 100 guests gathered at Yale-NUS Hall for the launch of Prof Kumaralingam Amirthalingam’s book: Medical Negligence and the Duty to Advise: Beyond Autonomy. Dean Andrew Simester opened the evening by welcoming the diverse audience and Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon delivered the opening address, offering his insights on medical negligence.

On 3 August, the Centre for Legal Theory at NUS Law welcomed Prof Irit Samet to speak at its Private Law Discussion Group (PLDG) seminar. Prof Samet is a Professor of Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London, where she also serves as a head of department (private law, IP & digital law). For her lecture, "The Trust: (Still) Equity's Child", she examined the three types of account of the lasting existence of equity as a distinctive part of private law: nominalist, formalist, and substantial.

On 4 May 2026, the Centre for Legal Theory at NUS Law welcomed Dr Luka Burazin as a Singapore Symposium in Legal Theory (SSLT) speaker. Dr Luka Burazin graduated and obtained his PhD from the Faculty of Law at the University of Zagreb and is now a full professor where he heads the Legal Theory Department. For his lecture, “Methodology of (Continental European) Legal Science: Research Objectives, Questions, and Methods”, Dr Burazin presented a more elaborate and rigorous methodological framework of legal science that is grounded in the insights of contemporary analytical legal theory.

The Centre for Legal Theory (CLT) at NUS Law was pleased to have Wang Gungwu prize recipient, Dr Irina Sakharova join us as our first Singapore Symposium in Legal Theory (SSLT) speaker for 2026. Dr Sakharova gave a seminar titled, “Consenting, Promising, and the Power to Contract” and moderated a roundtable discussion titled "Rights Under the Criminal Law and the Continuity Thesis" at NUS Law held on 13 April and 14 April 2026 respectively.

The Centre for Legal Theory (CLT) is pleased to have Professor Rosie Harding give a CLT seminar titled ‘Polyphonic Legality: A New Framework for Understanding The Experience of Law and Regulation for Cognitively Disabled Adults’ at NUS Law on 16 March, 2026. Professor Harding recognised for her outstanding contribution to disability and mental capacity law, discussed ‘Polyphonic Legality’, a novel concept that shows how the multiple sites and sources of regulation that cognitively disabled people experience work together to create their experience of law in their everyday lives.

The Centre for Legal Theory (CLT) at NUS Law is pleased to have Professor Brian Leiter, leading scholar in legal philosophy, give a CLT seminar titled ‘Against the Metaphysical Turn in Recent American Jurisprudence’ at NUS Law on 11 March 2026. Professor Leiter discussed a growing trend in contemporary legal philosophy to frame questions about the nature of law in highly abstract, metaphysical terms. He offered a critical perspective on recent developments in American jurisprudence, arguing for a return to approaches that better capture how law operates in practice and how legal reasoning guides behaviour beyond the courts.

CLT held a book launch on 09 March 2026 by Assistant Professor Benjamin Goh (NUS Law) for his book, The Materiality of Literature: Rereading Authorship and Copyright with Kant (Cambridge University Press, 2025). The book retraces the emergence of conceptions of authorship in the late-eighteenth-century Germany through the lens of Immanuel Kant, expounded in his 1785 essay ‘On the Wrongfulness of Reprinting’. In his book, Benjamin analysed Kant’s essay pretexts as indices of literacy production in German Enlightenment.

At the Centre for Legal Theory seminar held on 11 February 2026 at the National University of Singapore, Professor Norman Ho from Peking University School of Transnational Law gave a seminar on a conservative theory on property. The seminar expounds on Prof Ho’s conservative theory of property, drawn from the works of Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and Confucius (551-479BC).  The theory posited is monist, ground in human nature and emphasizes the intergenerational nature of property. The theory also emphasizes property’s power of individual moral formation and development.

At the Centre for Legal Theory seminar held on 11 February 2026 at the National University of Singapore, Professor Norman Ho from Peking University School of Transnational Law gave a seminar on the relationship between legal history and legal theory. The seminar expounds on the 3 possible ways to view the relationship between legal history and legal theory.

At the Centre for Legal Theory seminar held on 3 February 2026 at the National University of Singapore, Assistant Professor of Law Timothy Liau from London School of Economics gave a seminar on the recognition of rights in private law. The seminar focused on the recognition of private law rights – exploring the tension between whether private law is merely a ‘law of obligations’ or is it better described as the ‘law of interpersonal obligations’. He expands on this discussion with reference to declaratory judgements.

At the Singapore Symposium in Legal Theory Roundtable held on 28 October 2025 at the National University of Singapore, Professors Prince Saprai, James Penner, and Associate Professor Tan Zhong Xing convened to examine the evolving landscape of contemporary contract law theory. Over the past few decades, contract theory has undergone a profound transformation—from its traditional focus on the dichotomy between “will” theorists and their critics to a rich plurality of normative frameworks, methodological approaches, and perspectives on obligation, morality, and justice in private law.

In the seminar “Trust in Promise and Contract: One Sense or Two?” held on 27th October 2025, Professor of Law Prince Saprai of University College London defended Charles Fried’s claim in Contract as Promise that contracts, like promises, invoke trust. While much of the “contract and promise” debate focused on whether key contractual doctrines converge with or diverge from the rules governing promises outside the law, Fried’s aforementioned claim has received comparatively little attention, with the notable exception of Dori Kimel.