Professor David Collins delivers Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitors Lecture

Professor David Collins (centre) with (from left) Professor Christian Witting, Vice Dean of Academic Affairs and Undergraduate Studies, NUS Law; Professor Andrew Simester, Dean of NUS Law; Associate Professor Jean Ho, Director, NUS Law Academy; Ms Jill Ann Koh and Ms Monica Chong, Partners, WongPartnership LLP; and Mr Ng Kim Huat, Group Chief Financial Officer, Wing Tai Holdings LimitedOn 16 September 2025, Professor David Collins delivered a lecture titled “The Securitization of International Economic Law: Building Resilience or Exploiting Chaos?” at the Wee Chong Jin Moot Court on the Bukit Timah campus.

The geopolitical turmoil which has unfolded in recent times has augmented the role that national security plays in international economic law to an unprecedent degree, so much so that it has rendered the rule of law governing international trade and investment almost an irrelevancy. The scope of the essential security provisions in WTO and other economic integration treaties has empowered domestic lawmakers to enact a range of anti-market measures, ostensibly designed to foster resilience of strategic sectors in an era of instability magnified by weakening alliances. Steel tariffs, subsidisation of microchip production and banning of foreign technology companies are among the most salient of these. The wide discretion accorded by international tribunals to legitimise such policies has effectively neutered the Bretton Woods regime upon which globalisation was built.

Professor Collins’ lecture explored some of the key manifestations of the security-backed rejection of international economic legal principles centred on open markets and private property, including tariffs and subsidisation in trade, as well as foreign investment screening and expropriation. His lecture further considered some of the emerging legal issues arising in the administration and enforcement of economic integration treaties by international arbitration tribunals in the context of heightened geopolitical conflict.

The Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitors Programme was launched in 2012 as one of several initiatives to pay tribute to the late Madam Kwa Geok Choo, wife of Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew.  Since its launch, the Programme has enabled NUS Law to regularly bring in leading law academics to teach an intensive course and to share their perspectives on highly topical issues with our students, faculty and the wider legal fraternity. This Programme serves to uphold Madam Kwa’s remarkable legacy, by continuing her commitment to Singapore being an outward-looking country with a thriving legal discourse.

Past Distinguished Visitors include the following professors from esteemed institutions around the world: Gary Born (Partner at WilmerHale, and Chair of the International Arbitration Practice Group), Christine Chinkin (London School of Economics), Jane Ginsburg (Columbia University School of Law), Matthew Harding (Melbourne Law School), Ran Hirschl (University of Toronto), Michael Klausner (Stanford Law School), Peter Mirfield (University of Oxford), Donal Nolan (University of Oxford), Francis Reynolds (University of Oxford), Cheryl Saunders (Melbourne Law School) and Mark Tushnet (Harvard Law School). The lectures given will also be published in the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies.

Most recently, the 21^st and 22^nd Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitor Lectures were delivered by Professor Martin Petrin (formerly from Western University, at York University today) in 2023 and Professor Shazia Choudhry (University of Oxford) in 2024.

About Professor David Collins

Professor David Collins of the City Law School of City St George’s, University of London specialises in the law of the World Trade Organization and international investment law. He heads City Law School’s Digital Trade Research Group and is currently co-editing Routledge’s Handbook on International Economic Law.

A former prosecutor for the Attorney General of Ontario, he is a Solicitor of England & Wales and is a member of the Ontario and New York Bars. David is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal International Trade Law and Regulation and Series Editor for Routledge’s Insights on International Economic Law. He has been a visiting academic at many institutions including Columbia, Berkeley, the Institute of International Economic Law at Georgetown, the World Trade Institute in Bern and the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg.

He was nominated to the roster of panellists for the North America Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA’s)—it’s now known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) —trade remedy disputes by the government of Canada, and to the panel of arbitrators for EU free trade agreements by the European Commission. He has given evidence to the UK Parliament’s International Trade Select Committee on many occasions and was appointed as an Independent Member of the UK Trade Remedies Authority’s Audit and Risk Assurance Committee.