HOSTING INSTITUTION - NUS LAW
Established over sixty years ago, the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law (NUS Law) is widely regarded as Asia’s leading law school. It has been consistently ranked amongst the top 20 law schools in the world by Quacquarelli Symonds (#11 in 2022 and #10 in 2021) and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (#8 in 2022 and #12 in 2021).
Founded in 1956 as the Law Department of the University of Malaya in Singapore, the faculty accepted its first undergraduate cohort in 1957 — including Ambassador-at-large Professor Tommy Koh, Singapore’s former Chief Justice Chan Sek Keong and Emeritus Professor Koh Kheng Lian, who went on to play important roles in shaping Singapore’s laws and legal practices. Over six decades, NUS Law has made a tremendous impact on the study and the practice of law in Singapore.
Despite its humble beginnings, the faculty’s student population has expanded from its pioneer batch of 22 students to an intake of 250 undergraduate students and almost 200 graduate students per year today. These students are taught by over 70 full-time faculty members, as well as adjuncts and visitors, representing most of the major jurisdictions around the world.
To date, NUS Law has produced more than 10,000 law graduates, who have gone on to occupy the senior ranks of the judiciary, government, private practice, business, the arts and media communities as well as almost every niche of professional life in Singapore. Prominent NUS Law alumni include Singapore’s first female President Madam Halimah Yacob ’78, Minister for Law K. Shanmugam ’84, Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon ’86, actor and playwright Ivan Heng ’88, co-founder and CEO of Razer Inc, Tan Min-Liang ’02, and fashion designer Priscilla Shunmugam ’06.
NUS Law is dedicated to building a vibrant community and creating an environment that facilitates critical thinking and reflection on the fundamental legal issues confronting our interconnected world. It houses the following research centres:
- Asian Law Institute
- Asia-Pacific Centre for Environmental Law
- Centre for Asian Legal Studies
- Centre for Banking & Finance Law
- Centre for Maritime Law
- Centre for Legal Theory
- Centre for Technology, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence & the Law
- EW Barker Centre for Law & Business
EW BARKER CENTRE FOR LAW & BUSINESS
A successor institution to the former Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS), the EW Barker Centre for Law & Business seeks to enhance and promote research and educational opportunities for faculty, students, legal practitioners and business executives who share a common interest in the fields of Law, Business and Economics. These opportunities will be encouraged through the Centre's work and sponsorship of seminars, conferences and research endeavours. The EW Barker Centre for Law & Business will also engage in appropriate research projects commissioned by industry from time to time.
The vision of EWBCLB is to be the leading law centre in Asia in the field of Law and Business, and one of the leading research institutions in this field globally. It will seek to do this through inter-disciplinary work that has a strong comparative law focus, which includes examining the extent to which legal convergence is taking place in a globalized and interconnected world.
Areas of interest include:
- Bankruptcy law and insolvency law
- Business Organizations: Companies, General Partnerships, LLPs, LPs, Business Trusts, etc
- Competition Law and Policy, and Mergers and Acquisitions
- Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law and Policy
- International Business, and International Commercial Litigation
- Private law
- Taxation: Legal, Regulatory, and Accounting
CENTRE FOR TECHNOLOGY, ROBOTICS, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & THE LAW
The Centre for Technology, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence & the Law (TRAIL) was established in NUS Law to explore the relationship between technology and the various areas of legal research.
TRAIL's focus is to inform the debate on the legal, ethical, policy, philosophical and regulatory questions associated with the use and development of information technology (IT), artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics and robotics, in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, through contributions by way of original thinking, research, writing and publications; and to collaborate with like-minded research centres around the world to further inter-disciplinary research in, and the development of, possible guidelines, standards, and solutions to the legal, ethical, policy, philosophical and regulatory issues associated with the development and application of IT, AI, data analytics and robotics in key industries.
TRAIL was officially launched by Mr Edwin Tong, Senior Minister of State, Ministry for Law and Ministry for Health, at the 8th Asian Privacy Scholars Network (APSN) Conference on 5 December 2019.
SYMPOSIUM CONVENORS
PROFESSOR DAVID TAN
Head (Intellectual Property), EW Barker Centre for Law & Business
Co-Director, Centre for Technology, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence & the Law
Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore (“NUS Law”)
Professor David Tan was Vice Dean (Academic Affairs) from January 2015 to June 2021 at NUS Law where he oversaw the undergraduate and graduate coursework curriculum, and was the first to be appointed to the Dean’s Chair there. He is presently the Head of Intellectual Property research at the EW Barker Centre for Law & Business. In addition, he is an outstanding educator, having won the faculty-level teaching excellence award twice. He has been a visitor at Melbourne Law School and the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law teaching courses in intellectual property, as well as at the University of Tokyo (Todai) where he taught tort law.
David holds Ph.D., LL.B. (First Class Honours) and B.Com. degrees from the University of Melbourne and an LL.M. from Harvard. He joined NUS Law as an Assistant Professor in 2008, after a career spanning over a decade in the private and public sector.
At NUS Law, David pioneered courses in Entertainment Law, Freedom of Speech and Privacy & Data Protection Law. His areas of research cover personality rights, copyright, trademarks, freedom of expression, constitutional law and tort law, and his articles have been regularly cited by the Supreme Court of Singapore. His scholarship is primarily characterised by an interdisciplinary approach to intellectual property drawing on cultural studies and semiotics. He is presently on the Advisory Board for the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law and is an advisor to the Publications Committee of the Law Society of Singapore.
His law publications have appeared in a wide range of journals that include Yale Journal of International Law, Harvard Journal of Sports & Entertainment Law, Law Quarterly Review, Sydney Law Review, Singapore Journal of Legal Studies, Media & Arts Law Review and International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. His well-received monograph, The Commercial Appropriation of Fame: A Cultural Analysis of the Right of Publicity and Passing Off, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.
Email: david.tan@nus.edu.sg
Phone: +65 6516 6781
Address: NUS Law, 469G Bukit Timah Road, Eu Tong Sen Building, Singapore 259776, SINGAPORE
PROFESSOR GRAEME AUSTIN
Chair of Private Law, Faculty of Law, Victoria University of Wellington
Professor Graeme Austin is Chair of Private Law and Associate Dean of Learning & Teaching at Victoria University of Wellington. He is also Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne. He returned to Australasia in 2010, after serving for nearly ten years as a tenured professor at the University of Arizona, most recently as the J Byron McCormick Professor of Law, where he co-convened the Intellectual Property programme.
He has been a visiting professor at Wuhan University, the University of Western Ontario, and as the Yong Shook Lin Professor of Intellectual Property at NUS. His scholarship has been published in the Law Quarterly Review, NYU’s Annual Survey of American Law, the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, and the International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law. He is the author (with Larry Helfer at Duke) of Human Rights and Intellectual Property: Mapping the Global Interface (Cambridge 2011), on which his 2017 NUS course was based.
Email: graeme.austin@vuw.ac.nz
SECRETARIAT
Elicia Chia
Joshua Koh
Ifraim Sofian Faylasuf