Lucy Reed joins NUS as Director of the Centre for International Law

NUS Law is delighted to announce that Lucy Reed will be joining NUS Law in July as Director of the Centre for International Law and Professor of Practice.

Lucy holds degrees from Brown University and Chicago Law School and has been a partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer since 1998. Since 2009, she has been helming Freshfields’ global international arbitration group and public international law group. This builds on extensive experience working with the United States Government (as legal adviser in the State Department from 1985 to 1993) and in Asia (as general counsel of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organisation). In 2014, she was conferred the Asia Women in Business Award for Best in Dispute Resolution.

In addition to her rich professional background, Lucy has long had a deep engagement with the academic world. She has taught at American University and the University of Miami School of Law, and in 2001 was invited to deliver the prestigious Hague Lectures at the Academy of International Law. A measure of the esteem in which she is held by practitioners and scholars alike was her election as President of the American Society of International Law from 2008 to 2010.

Lucy will succeed Bob Beckman, who has served with distinction as Director of CIL since its founding in 2009, and who will continue to head its programme on Ocean Law and Policy.

In a testimonial from CJ Menon, he states: “I am delighted that the Centre has been able to hire Lucy as its next Director. Lucy is one of the most highly respected practitioners and thinkers in the world in the areas of international law and international arbitration and her appointment will bring an extremely valuable perspective to the Centre. I also congratulate Prof Bob Beckman on completing his tenure at the Centre. Bob taught me at NUS Law and has been a good friend through the years. He has done tremendous work in laying the foundations on which Lucy can now continue to build and strengthen a world class institution.”

Tommy Koh, Chairman of CIL’s Governing Board, offered the following quote: “Bob Beckman has done a wonderful job as the founding director. In the short space of five years, he has put CIL on the world map as a leading centre for international law. Lucy is eminently qualified to succeed Bob, to consolidate what has been achieved and to take CIL to a higher peak.”

Professor Simon Chesterman, Dean, NUS Law says that “Lucy Reed is the very model of a practitioner-scholar. She has reached the top of the profession, serving as counsel to private and public clients including governments and international organisations. At the same time, she has a deep and abiding engagement with the academic world, as both a speaker and an author. Bob Beckman has done an extraordinary job leading CIL over the past seven years. We are tremendously lucky that he will continue to head its Ocean Law and Policy programme, as well as working with Lucy as CIL writes its next chapter.”

Lucy is quoted as saying that “It is an honour and a privilege to be appointed to the Centre and NUS Faculty of Law. I have had the good fortune to learn and practise international law in many different private and public sector roles, and it is a dream-come-true to have this unique opportunity to bring all the strands together. I am also pleased to be staying in Singapore, where the legal and diplomatic communities have been extraordinarily welcoming, and to be able to engage from here with the panoply of international law issues we face regionally and globally. I thank Professor Beckman and the CIL Board, among others, for providing such a strong platform.”

More information on CIL at http://cil.nus.edu.sg/

Press release: http://news.nus.edu.sg/press-releases/9921-lucy-reed-joins-cil

News coverage
http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/education/world-renowed-arbitration-lawyer-lucy-reed-joins-nus-centre-for-international