Tan Zhong Xing receives NUS Annual Teaching Excellence Award

Assistant Professor Tan Zhong Xing

Assistant Professor Tan Zhong Xing ’12 is the Faculty of Law’s sole recipient of the University-level Annual Teaching Excellence Award this year.

The cornerstone of Zhong Xing’s approach to teaching is to make the student the centre of the entire learning experience. Being aware of the fact that law students will be learning and speaking in a completely new ‘language’ that they will not have been exposed to prior to studying at university, Zhong Xing consciously ‘code-switches’ to communicate. This process involves breaking down the assigned reading materials and translating it into concepts that first-year law students can better understand and use as a hook to make the transition to law school. This has proven to be highly successful.

A graduate of NUS Law and Harvard (where he received his LLM), Zhong Xing first joined NUS Law as a member of the inaugural batch of Sheridan Fellows, and was appointed Assistant Professor in 2018. Zhong Xing’s research and teaching interests are in contract law, private law and legal theory, and commercial and corporate law more generally, as well as the various intersection points between these fields. He has written more recently on the role of distributive justice in contract law, the rise of the ‘relational contract’ concept, the interface between private and public norms in contracting, as well as evolving doctrinal areas including the concept of good faith and the law of contractual interpretation.

His work has been published (or is forthcoming) in a number of leading general and specialist law journals, including Modern Law Review, Legal Studies, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, and has been cited by the Singapore Court of Appeal. Over the last few years Zhong Xing has received various awards, including the Hart Publishing Prize for the best paper by an early career scholar at the Ninth Biennial Conference on the Law of Obligations (2018), and previously, Harvard Law School’s Project on the Foundations of Private Law Prize, as well as the Montrose Memorial Prize for Jurisprudence and the Wong Peng Koon Prize for Best Directed Research Paper at NUS Law.

Zhong Xing chats about his research and teaching experiences here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4WQ-13-gYs&feature=youtu.be