Ernest Lim has been promoted to full Professor

We are pleased to share the news that Ernest Lim ’02 has been promoted to full Professor.

Ernest is a graduate of NUS Law who also holds degrees from Harvard (LLM) and Oxford (DPhil and BCL). He practised corporate and securities law in international law firms for several years, including being a capital markets attorney in the New York office of Davis Polk & Wardwell. Subsequently, he took up a post at the University of Hong Kong in 2011 and was promoted with tenure in 2014. Ernest returned to NUS Law to join the faculty in 2017.

An internationally recognised expert in comparative corporate law and governance, Ernest’s research has focused on sustainability, fiduciary duties, corporate attribution, and social entrepreneurship. He has also written on the legal implications of artificial intelligence. At its core, his research critically examines how the law can and should be used to not only deliver economic benefits, but also to promote social and environmental good.

His publications include three major sole-authored monographs with Cambridge University Press (CUP): A Case for Shareholders’ Fiduciary Duties in Common Law Asia (2019), which won the Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Runner-Up Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship; Sustainability and Corporate Mechanisms in Asia (2020); and Social Enterprises in Asia: A New Legal Form (2022, forthcoming). All three books are part of CUP’s International Corporate Law and Financial Market Regulation series.

His articles on corporate governance, general company law, and private law have been published or are forthcoming in elite peer reviewed journals such as the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the American Journal of Comparative Law, and the Law Quarterly Review. His work on corporate attribution in the Modern Law Review has been cited by the Singapore Court of Appeal and before the UK Supreme Court. His publications on AI include The Cambridge Handbook of Private Law and Artificial Intelligence (CUP forthcoming) of which he is the co-editor.

Among other indicators of distinction, he has been elected to the Robert S Campbell Visiting Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. He has also held visiting appointments at Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, King’s College London, Columbia Law School and Tel Aviv University.

Since joining academia, he has taken on various administrative roles related to journal editorship, recruitment, research, joint degree programme, and student exchange programme. He has served as a referee for OUP, CUP, and leading general and specialist journals. He has also been appointed Chair of the Faculty Search Committee and member of the Faculty Promotion and Tenure Committee.

Please join us in congratulating Ernest on this recognition of his many contributions to NUS and the wider academic and professional communities!