NUS Law welcomes Visiting Faculty – AY 2024/2025 Semester 1

NUS Law is delighted to welcome the following Visiting Faculty for AY 2024/2025 Phase 1 of Semester 1: Professor Shazia Choudhry, the Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitor; Professor Nelson Enonchong; Associate Professor Alexandros Ntovas; Professor Thomas Poole, the Lionel A. Sheridan Visiting Professor; Professor David Schneiderman, the Chan Sek Keong Visiting Professor; Professor Konstantinos Sergakis, the Peter Ellinger Visiting Professor; Associate Professor Michiel Spanjaart; and Associate Professor Runhua Wang, the Visiting Yong Shook Lin Professor of IP Law.

They were warmly introduced to the NUS Law family at the Start of Term Welcome Lunch, which took place at Block B’s Staff Lounge on 14 August.

At the Welcome Lunch, faculty members took turns to introduce the visiting professors, offering details on their illustrious background and anecdotes to break the ice. Amid the informal lunch setting, the atmosphere was convivial, with much cheerful conversation.

 

About the Professors and their modules:

Phase 1:

Shazia Choudhry (The Human Rights of Women)

Professor Shazia Choudhry is Professor of Law and the Jeffrey Hackney Tutorial Fellow in Law at Wadham. She is also an Academic Bencher and Associate Academic Fellow at the Inner Temple. Professor Choudhry was recently nominated as the United Kingdom’s first candidate for election to the UN CEDAW Committee.

Her research is focused on gender, human rights and violence against women and seeks to examine various dimensions of these areas from an interdisciplinary and feminist perspective. In doing so she employs doctrinal, theoretical and empirical methods. Her scholarship sits at the interface of criminal law, human rights law and family law.

Nelson Enonchong (Trade Finance Law)

Professor Nelson Enonchong read law at the University of Yaounde and Jesus College, Cambridge. He was a lecturer and Reader in Law at the University of Leicester before joining the University of Birmingham as Barber Professor of Law in 2001.

Professor Enonchong’s principal research interests are in the fields of Contract/Commercial Law, International Trade and Finance, Private International law and Comparative law. He is the author of several influential publications in these areas.

Alexandros Ntovas (Maritime Law)

Dr Alexandros X.M. Ntovas is an expert advocate and tenured academic in the areas of international law of the sea, admiralty, navigational freedoms and practice, marine environmental law and shipping regulation. He has practiced public and administrative law, and acts on numerous occasions as a policy advisor to governments, including the European Union, the public sector and the shipping industry. His expertise lies in the law of the sea and ocean governance; admiralty, with a focus on wet shipping law; navigational freedoms and practice, as well as in issues regarding piracy and other aspects of contemporary safety and security of ships, ports and offshore installations.

He is a Professor Associate, PhD, (at the level of Readership) in Maritime Law at the University of Southampton Law School, and the former Director of the Institute of Maritime Law, UK, and Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy. He first joined the University of Southampton in 2007 as a doctoral scholarship recipient to pursue his PhD, receiving immediately after its completion a full-time law lectureship in the Law School, where he was also a Governing Board Member of the Institute of Maritime Law. In 2016 he moved to the University of London, at Queen Mary’s Centre for Commercial Law Studies and the King’s College London, Dickson Poon School of Law, where he extensively lectured, developed new programmes, researched and provided consultancy in the areas of shipping, offshore energy and natural resources, law of the sea and ocean governance. In 2019 he rejoined the University of Southampton Law School as Professor Associate of Maritime Law, at the level of Readership, and the Director of the Institute of Maritime Law (2020–2023).

Thomas Poole (Law & Empire)

Professor Thomas Poole is a Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2006. His research interests include constitutional and administrative law, legal and political theory, foreign relations law, constitutional history, law and empire, and the history of political thought. He is author of Reason of State: Law, Prerogative and Empire (Cambridge, 2015) and co-editor of volumes on Hobbes and the Law (Cambridge, 2012), Law, Liberty and State: Oakeshott, Hayek and Schmitt on the Rule of Law (Cambridge, 2015) and The Double-Facing Constitution: Legal Externalities and the Reshaping of Constitutional Order (Cambridge, 2019). Tom is General Editor of the Modern Law Review and General Editor (with David Dyzenhaus) of CUP’s Cambridge Studies in Constitutional Law.

David Schneiderman (Comparative Constitutional Law)

David Schneiderman is Professor of Law and Political Science (courtesy) at the University of Toronto where he teaches courses on Canadian, US and comparative constitutional law and international investment law. He has been visiting Professor of Law at Gothenburg University, University of Stockholm, Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Georgetown University, Columbia University and the New School for Social Research.

He is the author of over 80 articles and book chapters and, in addition, the author or editor of over a dozen books, including Constitutionalizing Economic Globalization: Investment Rules and Democracy’s Promise (Cambridge UP 2008), Resisting Economic Globalization: Critical Theory and International Investment Law (Palgrave 2013), Red, White and Kind of Blue? The Conservatives and the Americanization of Canadian Constitutional Culture (U Toronto, 2015) and Investment Law’s Alibis: Colonialism, Imperialism, Debt and Development (Cambridge UP, 2022). His newest book is entitled Constitutional Review and International Investment Law: Deference or Defiance? (Oxford UP, 2024).

Konstantinos Sergakis (Ethics in Finance)

Konstantinos Sergakis is Professor of Capital Markets Law and Corporate Governance at the University of Glasgow. He acts as the Postgraduate Teaching Director, having previously convened the LLM in Corporate & Financial Law and acted as School Director for Internationalisation. He holds an LL.B from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, an LLM in International Business Law from University College London and a PhD from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Professor Sergakis is a Member (Alternate) of the Joint Board of Appeal of the European Supervisory Authorities (EBA, EIOPA, ESMA) and serves as Chairperson of the BPP Oversight Committee (BPP OC), the proxy advisors’ global industry group. His role is to provide, together with the other Committee members (listed company and institutional investor representatives) an annual independent review of the monitoring of the Best Practice Principles and an annual independent review of the public reporting of each BPP Signatory. He has also served as Advisor at Mefop Spa, the company created by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance for the development of the pension fund market and of other social security forms and undertakes public policy initiatives in the area of stewardship, such as the co-authorship of the inaugural Stewardship Guidelines for Italian pension funds.

Michiel Spanjaart (Carriage of Goods By Sea)

Dr Michiel Spanjaart was a Postdoctoral Fellow at NUS Law from August 2013 to July 2015 and MPA Visiting Professor of Maritime Law in August 2015, teaching an intensive elective course on Multimodal Transport Law. Since then, he has taught and visited NUS Law as Senior Visiting Research Fellow on several occasions.

Michiel is currently a lecturer at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam (the Netherlands) as well as advisor at Kneppelhout & Korthals Advocaten. He is the founding partner of Rotterdam law firm, Trains & Co., and formerly a partner with Padberg Spanjaart, and before that with DLA Piper. His practice areas include transport, insurance and commercial law.

Runhua Wang (International Patent Law, Policy and Practice)

Dr Runhua Wang is an Associate Professor at the University of Science and Technology Beijing. Her research interests span several areas which include Intellectual Property (IP), Innovation Policy and Management, and Law and Technology.

Her research methodology involves empirical analysis, application of law and economics theories, and comparative studies. Previously, she held positions at institutions such as Chicago-Kent, the Institute of Intellectual Property in Tokyo, and the University of Illinois College of Law. Dr Wang’s work contributes to our understanding of IP laws, innovation policies, and the interplay between law and technology.

Phase 2:

Marie-Louise Holle (Civil Law in a Global Perspective)

Dr Marie-Louise Holle is an Associate Professor at the Department of Business Humanities and Law, Copenhagen Business School. Dr Holle’s research focuses on torts, contracts and climate litigation from both private and public law perspectives.

Dr Holle is a member of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Peer Review Network at Columbia University Law School. Her research in climate litigation is a continuation of her long research in liability, torts and litigation. Holle is now also a Sabin Center rapporteur for four French-speaking as well as English-speaking jurisdictions (Madagascar, Monaco, Namibia and the Seychelles). Additionally, Dr Holle has also joined the Sabin Center’s research group for corporate liability and climate change. Dr Holle has carried out a number of research projects involving comparative law, foreign and international law. She has published her research in French, English and Danish. She is a member of the Climate Law and Economics research group at CBS LAW.

Akshaya Kamalnath (Corporations, Technology and the Law)

Dr Akshaya Kamalnath is an Associate Professor at the Australian National University. Her research and teaching areas are corporate law, corporate governance, and corporate insolvency law. She has published on areas such as diversity within corporations, corporate social responsibility, AI and corporate governance, and equity crowdfunding regulation.

Dr Kamalnath has also worked as a Lecturer at AUT Law School in Auckland and Deakin Law School in Melbourne. Prior to joining academia, she worked in a leading law firm in India.

Michael Karayanni (Religion, State and Multiculturalism)

Professor Michael Karayanni is the Bruce W. Wayne Professor of International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and specializes in private international law and inter-religious law, multiculturalism and civil procedure. He served as the Dean of the Faculty of Law and before that was the founding director of the Center of the Study of Multiculturalism and Diversity and the academic director of the Minerva Center for Human Rights and the Sacher Institute for Legislative Research and Comparative Law.

Professor Karayanni held visiting positions at Georgetown University Law Center, University of Melbourne Law School, Stanford Law School, Yale Law School and the University of Chicago Law School, University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law,  Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He also serves as a member of the executive editorial board of the American Journal of Comparative Law and was elected as an associate member of the Institut de Droit International as well as Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Matt Matravers (Classic and Contemporary Texts in Crime and Punishment)

Professor Matt Matravers holds the position of Professor of Law at York Law School. Professor Matravers began his journey at the University of York in 1995, where he served as a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations. He is on the AHRC Peer Review College and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. In addition, Professor Matravers is Director of the Morrell Centre for Legal and Political Philosophy.