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Professor Matthew Harding delivers 18th Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitor Lecture
Professor Matthew Harding delivered the 18th Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitor Lecture on 16 January 2020 to a full house at the Moot Court. Amongst the guests were Justice Vinodh Coomaraswamy and policy officers from the Ministry of Culture, Community & Youth (MCCY).
The lecture, titled “Charity and Law: Past, Present and Future”, focused on law’s contribution to constituting and maintaining a particular mode of action, which Professor Harding called “legal charity”. He contended that legal charity is an artifice of law; as a mode of action it would not exist but for the law that creates and sustains it. Nonetheless, it has a life outside of the law, in regulatory practice, in the self-understanding of not-for-profit organisations, and in public culture more generally. He noted that by the turn of the 21st century, legal charity is confined to the pursuit of purposes that judges or regulators decide are sufficiently public and sufficiently beneficial, and is organised around a particular conception of altruism – generating benefits for a ‘stranger’ class defined in virtue of its public character – and it opposes itself to the norms of family and associational loyalty, political activism, government administration, and market capitalism.
Professor Harding observed in his lecture that: “Here in Singapore, tax deductions for donors are triggered not by gifts to charities as such, but instead by gifts to a subset of charities called Institutions of a Public Character. These are charities whose focus is on generating public benefit for the whole Singaporean community as opposed to sections of the community defined by race or religion. The deduction is currently 250%, indicating a strong state objective of endorsing and promoting certain public benefit purposes. [Thus] in Singapore, legal charity is not considered a sufficiently finely-tuned doctrinal category to serve that objective.”
In his conclusion, while of the view that legal charity is the legacy of past doctrinal development, Professor Harding suggested: “But precisely because legal charity has been on the scene for so long, it may be worth trying to imagine a future in which law continues to constitute and maintain legal charity as a mode of action, even if it is decoupled from trusts law, tax law and regulation.”
About Professor Matthew Harding
Matthew Harding is Deputy Dean at Melbourne Law School. He graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1998 with First Class Honours degrees in law and in arts. He also holds a BCL (with distinction) and a DPhil from Oxford.
During his time as a postgraduate student in Oxford, Matthew held Chevening and Clarendon Fund Scholarships and, during 2002-3, a research fellowship funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. His DPhil thesis was on the moral foundations of fiduciary law. Prior to undertaking postgraduate study, Matthew also worked as a solicitor for Arthur Robinson & Hedderwicks (now Allens) in Melbourne.
Matthew has published widely on issues in moral and political philosophy, the theory and doctrines of equity, property law, judicial practice and precedent, and the law of charity. He is the author of Charity Law and the Liberal State (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and the co-editor (with Professor Elise Bant) of Exploring Private Law (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and (with Professors Ann O’Connell and Miranda Stewart) of Not-for-Profit Law: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
He is also the Co-Convener of the Melbourne Law School’s Obligations Group, an editor of the Journal of Equity, and a director of the Charity Law Association of Australia and New Zealand. Matthew has been a visiting scholar at numerous law schools including University of Toronto and Queen’s University Belfast, and now at NUS Law where he is teaching an intensive course “Charity Law Today” over three weeks.
