Professor Douglas Kysar delivers Visiting Tan Ah Tah Professorial Lecture

On 29 January 2026, Professor Douglas Kysar delivered a lecture titled “Systems so Perfect: Alternative Proteins and the Dream of Abundance” at the performance hall located on the Kent Ridge campus of the National University of Singapore, Faculty of Law.

Meat production in industrialised nations today would be unrecognisable to anyone who participated in animal farming during the previous 11,000 years of livestock domestication. This lecture outlined ways in which contemporary modes of intensive meat production impose harms onto consumers, workers, neighbouring communities, animals, ecosystems and the global atmosphere, among other recipients of industrial animal agriculture’s “negative externalities”.

Notwithstanding these extensive impacts, industrial animal agriculture as a sector within the global economy remains largely free of consequential regulatory controls. In the absence of direct legal constraints on the sector, some nations, policymakers and advocates have turned to the promotion of alternative proteins in hopes that these technologies will eventually offer less harmful substitutes. Professor Kysar discussed the possibilities and controversies raised by these alternatives, situating them within a larger moral and legal discussion regarding humanity’s obligations to the non-human world.

The Tan Ah Tah Professorship in Law was established at NUS Law in honour of Singapore’s first local Supreme Court Justice. It was endowed by Justice Tan’s daughter, the late Mrs Eileen Tan Siew Lean, in celebration of his ground-breaking achievements and many years of legal service.

Justice Tan made history in Singapore by becoming the first local to be appointed as a Supreme Court Judge in 1955, when Singapore was still a British colony. In 1963, he was appointed as Judge of Singapore’s Supreme Court in the post-colonial period, altogether serving in the highest court in the land for two decades when he stepped down in 1975, blazing the trail for future generations of lawyers.

In attendance at the lecture was Dr Anne-Marie Schleich, the daughter-in-law of the late Justice Tan. Dr Schleich is a distinguished German career diplomat and an international affairs expert based in Singapore. She serves as an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, where her work focuses on Asia-Pacific geopolitics and international relations.

About Professor Douglas Kysar

Professor Douglas Kysar is the Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School where he also holds courtesy appointments in the School of Management and the School of the Environment.

He is the Faculty Director of the Law, Environment and Animals Program at Yale and has twice served as Deputy Dean for the Law School. His teaching and research areas include torts, environmental law, climate change, animal law, products liability and risk regulation.

He received his BA summa cum laude from Indiana University in 1995 and his JD magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1998. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable William G. Young of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. During his academic career, he has served as a visiting professor at several leading law schools around the world, including four times at NUS Law.