Right Honourable Lord Jonathan Mance Visits NUS Law

NUS Law welcomed the Right Honourable Lord Jonathan Mance, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom at the Bukit Timah Campus on 27 August, 2015.

Lord Mance was hosted to lunch at the Guild House by NUS Law Dean Professor Simon Chesterman and along with Vice Dean (Research) Professor James Penner; Professor Damian John Chalmers; Professor M. Sornarajah, Assistant Professor Jean Ho, Assistant Professor Arif Jamal, and Assistant Professor Nicole Roughan.

After lunch, Lord Mance visited the Centre for International Law (CIL) where he met with Associate Professor Robert Beckman, Director for CIL and his team.

A well respected figure in the legal fraternity, Lord Mance was in Singapore as one of the featured speakers in the Singapore Academy of Law Distinguished Speaker Lecture series, which took place on 28 August. In his lecture, “Arbitration and the Law: A Jigsaw Relationship?”, Lord Mance considered the extent to which arbitration can and should claim to operate independently of the law of the seat or other systems which may have an involvement with the parties or the enforcement of any award. Questions of the consistency and wisdom of theses advocating an independent or transnational system of arbitration, as well as problems arbitration already faces in maintaining coherence in its jurisprudence and confidence in its efficacy and appropriateness as a dispute-resolution mechanism, were also addressed.

During his visit to Singapore, Lord Mance was also invited to give the keynote address at the launch of the Singapore Branch of the International Law Association, which he attended with the Honourable Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon on 27 August at the Supreme Court Auditorium. The launch was followed by a panel discussion on the topic “Why Does Singapore Need International Law? What’s Singapore’s Role in International Law?” Members of the panel included Professor S. Jayakumar, Chairman of the International Advisory Panel of the NUS Centre for International Law, Mr Lionel Yee, SC, Solicitor General, and Mr J. Christopher Thomas, QC, Senior Principal Research Fellow at the NUS Centre for International Law and was moderated by Professor Simon Chesterman, Dean of NUS Law.