Helena Whalen-Bridge LLM’02 awarded the 2019 Teresa Godwin Phelps Award for Scholarship in Legal Communication

Associate Professor Helena Whalen-Bridge

NUS Law congratulates Associate Professor Helena Whalen-Bridge on having received the 2019 Teresa Godwin Phelps Award for Scholarship in Legal Communication. The Phelps Award honours and highlights individual works of outstanding scholarship specific to the legal writing discipline that are published in any given calendar year. The award is meant to set aspirational standards for others writing in the field.

The Selection Committee unanimously recommended Helena for her article ‘Negative Narrative: Reconsidering Client Portrayals’ (2019) 16 Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD 151. As one nominator wrote: “Helena makes a strong case for expanding lawyers’ range of narrative choices when confronted with a client who is not easily portrayed positively … [T]his article brings to light … that we have more choices for creating a narrative than simply making our client the “good guy.” This dose of reality is sorely needed for law students and practitioners, and Helena does an excellent job writing an article that can appeal to both. I think this article is particularly timely in our current “post-fact” reality… This article will, I believe, lead to more work on the idea of how to tell the stories we may not want to.​”

In addition to legal narrative, Helena’s teaching and research interests are in legal education, ethics, legal skills and pro bono, and her work has been published in a number of leading general and specialist law journals including the International Journal of Law in Context, International Journal of the Legal Profession, Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors, Fordham International Law Journal, Asian Journal of Comparative Law and Legal Ethics.