Professor Damian Chalmers delivers inaugural Geoffrey Bartholomew Professorial Lecture

On 2 Sept 2025, Professor Damian Chalmers delivered a lecture titled “Globalisation, The Law, and ‘Making Markets Better’ in the Global South” at the Wee Chong Jin Moot Court on the Bukit Timah campus.

From the late 1980s, regulatory laws spread across the world. This advance is associated with the adoption of legal models from the Global North, strong formal similarities between these laws, and the growth and specialisation of state capacities. This legal globalisation has not withered but domestic levels of engagement with it have been heterogeneous. These laws have thrived in some places and generated little response in others. In states where they have thrived, their trajectories have also often been very different from what was initially expected.

This lecture looked at what sustained and transformed this legal globalisation. Professor Chalmers argued that globalisation and anti-globalisation narratives were too thin to sustain or block it in individual states; instead, using competition policy case studies from three regions in the Global South, these laws were used by domestic actors as a part of a wider reaching domestic process to revise what the domestic market should be about.

In some instances, this consolidated the existing political economy. In others, it reformed it. In all, it substantially informed the law and institutional settlement that emerged, so it is now possible to identify regulatory law across the Global South with a number of distinct market models.

The Geoffrey Bartholomew Professorship was established in 2005 in honour of the late Professor Geoffrey Wilson Bartholomew, who was a distinguished teacher of law and served as Dean from 1966 to 1968 at the Faculty of Law, University of Malaya, now known as NUS Law. Professor Bartholomew came to Singapore in 1960 to teach commercial and family law and remained as professor until 1976. His profound influence shaped generations of lawyers in Singapore and Malaysia through his teaching and writing, while his pioneering research and publications are integral to the foundational legal literature and history of both nations, significantly contributing to the development of their indigenous legal systems.

This Professorship serves as a fitting tribute to his exceptional contributions to the legal profession and legal scholarship. It helps the Faculty to engage and retain legal experts at NUS Law, ensuring the continued provision of exemplary legal education for the students.

About Professor Damian Chalmers

Professor Damian Chalmers is the Geoffrey Bartholomew Chair in Law and Regional Organisation and of EU law at the National University of Singapore, Faculty of Law. He was Vice Dean of Research between 2019 and 2023.

Prior to that, Professor Chalmers practised at the London School of Economics and Political Science for 24 years, serving as a Pprofessor for 10 years. He was Head of its European Institute and the Jean Monnet Centre there for four years.

He has held visiting appointments at tertiary institutions and think tanks across the world. He was co-editor of the European Law Review for six years and won the Wedderburn Prize in 1997 for best article in the Modern Law Review in that year.