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Annual Teaching Excellence Award 2016
NUS Law congratulates Assistant Professor Cheah Wui Ling ’03, Assistant Professor Swati Jhaveri, Associate Professor Joel Lee, Assistant Professor Jaclyn Neo ’03, Professor Alan Tan ’93 and Mr Benny Tan ’12 on being awarded the Annual Teaching Excellence Award for 2016.
The award is given by the Faculty to recognise faculty members who have demonstrated a very high level of commitment to, and achievement of, good teaching. The recipients were presented with the award by Professor Simon Chesterman, Dean of NUS Law, on 11 January 2017 at the Faculty’s “Semester Welcome Lunch”.
Assistant Professor Cheah Wui Ling
Cheah Wui Ling joined the Faculty in 2007 and holds a joint appointment at the NUS University Scholars Program. She obtained her LL.B. and an LL.M. from NUS Law, an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, European University Institute, and a D.Phil from Oxford University. She is a qualified lawyer (called to the New York Bar) and holds a diploma in arbitration (Queen Mary University of London).
Prior to entering academia, she served as a Legal Officer at INTERPOL’s Office of Legal Affairs (Lyon, France). In 2011, she was a Visiting Professional at the International Criminal Court. Her teaching experience includes periods at the Centre for Transnational Legal Studies (London, UK), Oxford University (UK), Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 (France), and the Royal University of Law jaclyn and Economics (Cambodia). Her work has been published in journals such as the Harvard Human Rights Journal, Journal of International Criminal Justice, and International Journal of Law in Context. Currently, she is working on a book project on the Singapore war crimes trials. She is also co-founder of the Singapore War Crimes Trials Web Portal (http://www.singaporewarcrimestrials.com/).
Click here to read a letter that Wui Ling wrote to her younger self as an undergraduate student at NUS Law!
Assistant Professor Swati Jhaveri
Swati previously taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law from 2006 -2014. Her areas of research include public law and the law of torts. She has published in these areas in Public Law, the Tort Law Review and the International Journal of Constitutional Law. While at CUHK, she was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Exemplary Teaching Award. She was also awarded a competitive research grant from the General Research Fund of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong to investigate the post-1997 impact of judicial review on legislative process and content.
Swati obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Jurisprudence (First Class Honours) and Bachelor of Civil Law (Distinction) from the University of Oxford. She previously practiced law at Allen & Overy, specialising in international commercial arbitration. She is a Solicitor of the Hong Kong SAR and England & Wales and is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.
Click here to read a letter that Swati wrote to her younger self on the first day of law school!
Joel Lee runs the faculty’s Negotiation and Mediation Workshops. A graduate of Victoria University of Wellington and Harvard Law Schools, Joel is a consultant with CMPartners (USA) and a principal mediator with and a trainer of the Singapore Mediation Centre.
Joel has extensive experience as a consultant and trainer for corporate clients such as Standard Chartered Bank, Freshfields, the Singapore Institute of Management, Service Quality Centre, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, the Government Insurance Corporation of Singapore, SingTel, IE Singapore and EDB.
Joel is an adjudicator with the Financial Industry Disputes Resolution Centre and a member of the ADR Advisory Council of the Subordinate Courts of Singapore. He is also a member of the International Mediation Institute’s Independent Standards Commission and Intercultural Taskforce. In November 2014, the Singapore International Mediation Institute was launched with Joel as the institute’s chairman.
Joel was Vice Dean (Student Affairs) at NUS Law from 2011 to 2014, and has taught overseas at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), University of Law, Economics and Science of Aix-Marseille (Aix-en-Provence France) and Anglia Law School (UK).
Assistant Professor Jaclyn Neo
A graduate of the NUS Law Faculty, Jaclyn Neo worked as a litigation lawyer before joining the faculty. She was awarded the NUS Overseas Graduate Scholarship to pursue her Masters of Laws from Yale Law School and subsequently received another scholarship from NUS to pursue her Doctor of the Science of Law from Yale. Jaclyn teaches Constitutional and Administrative Law, Comparative State and Religion, and Law, Migration, and Citizenship. Her research is primarily in the areas of constitutional and human rights law, with specific focus on women and minorities. Jaclyn has published in local and international journals, and is currently working on a research project on regulating religion and constitutional interpretation in Singapore.
Alan Tan specialises in Aviation Law, Maritime Law, Criminal Law and Environmental Law. Born in Penang, Malaysia, Alan was educated at the Penang Free School and Raffles Junior College, subsequently obtaining an LL.B. from NUS Law and an LL.M. and a J.S.D. from Yale Law School. He was the winner of the Koh Han Kok Prize for International Law at NUS, and his doctoral thesis on the law and politics of shipping regulation won the Ambrose Gherini International Law Prize at Yale Law School.
Alan was Vice Dean (Graduate Studies and Research) at NUS Law from 2006 to 2010. He was Director (Projects) in the Office of the Provost at NUS from 2011 to 2012, overseeing the newly-established Yale-NUS College’s double degree programs. He was also Director of the NYU@NUS Dual Degree program through which students obtained two LL.M. degrees from the New York University and NUS Law Schools.
In 2009, he was appointed as Hauser Global Visiting Professor at New York University School of Law, where he taught global aviation law and policy. He has also taught at the University of Sydney and served as a consultant to various governments and donor agencies, including the Vietnamese government and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Alan has also been engaged as a consultant on aviation liberalization in Asia by the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Arab League and various national governments.
Benny Tan graduated from NUS Law in 2012 and was placed on the Dean’s List in his final undergraduate year. He then practiced as a Deputy Public Prosecutor and State Counsel at the Attorney-General’s Chambers, where he rendered legal advice to the police, attended pre-trial conferences, coroner’s inquiries, argued at plead guilty mentions and also conducted trials and appeals.
In mid-2014, Benny returned to the Faculty as a legal skills tutor, where he taught legal skills courses to both undergraduate and graduate students. He currently also teaches Evidence Law.
He has published articles in both local and international journals, and his pieces have been cited by the High Court and Court of Appeal of Singapore. He won the Best Feature Article prize awarded by the Law Society of Singapore, Law Gazette twice in a row (2015 and 2016).
Benny has been appointed by the Supreme Court of Singapore to the Young Amicus Curiae panel (2016, 2017), where he will be called upon to assist the courts in cases involving novel or complex issues of the law.
To support the pro bono cause and to continue to hone his legal skills, Benny now also acts, on a pro bono and ad-hoc basis, as defence counsel in criminal cases and appeals.
Click here to read a letter that Benny addressed to himself at the start of the second semester of his first year in law school!