NUS Law welcomes Visiting Professors – August 2018

NUS Law welcomes our Visiting Faculty for Semester One of the new academic year.

Scott Brewer (The Fulfilled Life and the Life of the Law)
Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitor

Professor Scott Brewer is a Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University (1997) and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988), where he was the Editor-in-Chief for Volume 97 of the Yale Law Journal. He was a law clerk for Judge Harry T. Edwards of the United States D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals (1989-90) and then for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court (October Term 1990).

Professor Brewer writes and teaches about the nature and uses of arguments (including but not limited to legal arguments), the role of arguments in law (and specifically, contract law and the law of evidence), politics, and “everyday life.” He also writes and teaches about the central question of what constitutes a fulfilled life, as for example, in the course “The Fulfilled Life and the Life of the Law”, taught at Harvard Law School and in universities in Europe and Asia.

David Fox (Monetary Law)
Peter Ellinger Visiting Professor

Professor David Fox holds the Chair of Common Law at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand and received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge.

Prior to joining Edinburgh, he was a Fellow of St John’s College in the University of Cambridge, where his teaching touched on most aspects of private law, concentrating on property, trusts, and monetary law. He is a barrister in England and Wales, with a door tenancy at Maitland Chambers in London.

His research interests have a strong historical and comparative focus.  They concentrate on the formation modern trust and property doctrine in common law systems, and on the private law applicable to money.

Gu Weixia (Arbitration and Dispute Resolution in China)
Visiting Associate Professor

Dr Gu Weixia is a tenured Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Master of Common Law Programme at the Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong. Her research interests are in international arbitration and dispute resolution, conflict of laws (private international law), cross-border legal issues, with a particular focus on China, Hong Kong and Asia.

Weixia is an Executive Council Member of China Society of Private International Law, a Member of Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, an Associate of International Center for Dispute Resolution under the American Arbitration Association, and a Panel-listed Arbitrator of South China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission. She sits on the editorial board of Hong Kong Law Journal (SSCI).

Prior to joining The University of Hong Kong, Weixia was the youngest recipient in Hong Kong of the prestigious Fulbright Award from the United States Department of State and had been selected as an Honorary Young Fellow of the New York University. She has held visiting positions at Cornell and Fordham Universities (United States), Chuo University (Japan), East China University of Political Science & Law (China), and Academia Sinica (Taiwan), where she taught and researched on commercial arbitration and regional conflict of laws.

Louise Gullifer (Secured Transactions Law)
Visiting Professor

Professor Louise Gullifer Q.C. (Hon) is a Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in law at Harris Manchester College, Oxford. She is the Director of the Commercial Law Centre at Harris Manchester College and the Secured Transaction Law Reform Project, and the Oxford Law Faculty Academic Lead for the Cape Town Convention Academic Project. She holds one of the temporary chairs of the Business and Law Research Centre, International Commercial Law, at Radboud University, Nijmegen and was the 2017-2018 Chair of Excellence at University Carlos III of Madrid.

She teaches Roman law, contract law, commercial law, corporate finance law and legal concepts in financial law. Her research interests focus broadly on commercial law and corporate finance. She has co-authored books on security and title financing and corporate finance, personal property and set-off in arbitration, and has co-edited books on insolvency, secured transactions law reform and intermediated securities. She is one of the UK delegates to UNIDROIT and UNCITRAL (working group VI).

Christopher Hare (Trade Finance Law)
Visiting Associate Professor

Christopher Hare is the Travers Smith Associate Professor of Corporate and Commercial Law at the University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow in Law at Somerville College, Oxford. He has previously held posts at the University of Auckland and Jesus College, Cambridge.

He has degrees from Trinity College, Cambridge, Harvard Law School, and Brasenose College, Oxford. His teaching and research interests lie broadly in the law of obligations and the corporate and commercial law fields, with particular focus on domestic and international banking law, corporate finance, and shareholder remedies. He has co-authored Modern Banking Law (OUP,5th ed, 2011), Company Law in New Zealand (LexisNexis, 2nd ed, 2015) and Principles of Banking Law (OUP, 3rd ed, 2017). He is currently working on new editions of Paget’s Law of Banking and Rowlatt on Principal and Surety.

Benjamin Hughes (Interim Measures in International Arbitration)
Visiting Associate Professor

Associate Professor Benjamin Hughes of Seoul National University (SNU) Law School, is an arbitrator and door tenant of Fountain Court Chambers in London and of The Arbitration Chambers in Singapore.

Associate Professor Hughes is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, the Hong Kong Institute of Arbitrators and the Singapore Institute of Arbitrators. He taught extensively in the field of international dispute resolution prior to joining the law faculty at SNU, including as Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law and as Adjunct Professor at Korea University School of Law.

John Paterson (International & Comparative Oil and Gas Law)
Visiting Professor

Professor John Paterson is Chair in Law at the University of Aberdeen. He is a member of the Centre for Energy Law and directs Aberdeen’s involvement in the North Sea Energy Law Programme.

His research interests include systems theory, the regulation of risk, governance in the EU, corporate governance and energy law. He has been involved in international projects in research, teaching and capacity building and provided specialist training in oil and gas law and corporate governance for the corporate sector, expert advice in international arbitration, and consultancy to international organisations. He is series editor (together with Professor Julian Webb) of the Law, Science and Society series published by Routledge-Cavendish. He is co-editor of Oil and Gas Law in the UK: Current Practice and Emerging Trends (3rd ed., 2 vols, 2018).

Michiel Spanjaart (Multimodal Transport Law)
Visiting Associate Professor

Dr Michiel Spanjaart was a Postdoctoral Fellow at NUS from August 2013 to July 2015 and MPA Visiting Professor of Maritime Law at NUS in August 2015, teaching an intensive elective course on Multimodal Transport Law.

He is currently an Independent Contractor at Erasmus University as well as an advocate with the Rotterdam firm TraIns & Co. Prior to his move to TraIns & Co., Michiel was a partner with Kneppelhout & Korthals Advocaten, Padberg Spanjaart Advocaten, and before that with DLA Piper. His field of expertise includes transport and insurance & commercial law.