This course introduces students to electronic evidence, which covers every area of law. Most legal problems presented to lawyers now include an element of electronic evidence. It is incumbent on judges, lawyers and legal academics to be familiar with the topic in the service of justice. Electronic evidence is ubiquitous. Using an array of mobile technologies, people communicate regularly through social networking sites, e-mail and other virtual methods managed by organisations that are transnational. No area of human activity is free from the networked world – this also means no area of law is free from the effects of electronic evidence.

NUS Compulsory Core Law Curriculum or common law equivalent.
LC3001A Evidence (A)

This course focuses on an interdisciplinary approach to understanding popular icons in contemporary consumer culture and the world of entertainment. It examines the symbolic meanings of famous celebrity personalities, iconic brands, well-known fictional characters, popular books and movies, and how the law interacts with these entities. It provides a transnational perspective with an emphasis on cases from California (where Hollywood is located), New York (where numerous celebrities are resident and global entertainment conglomerates are headquartered) and the United Kingdom. This is not a course on entertainment law in Singapore, but the principles you learn could be relevant to Singapore law. It also does not aim to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of all the legal issues confronting the entertainment industries of movies, music, books and new media. It is just not possible in a 5-credit elective course taught in one semester.

With case studies ranging from Taylor Swift to Elvis Presley, Michael Jordan to Tiger Woods, Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons, Avatar to Star Wars, Blurred Lines to Somebody To Love, this course will cover a number of prominent causes of action in copyright, trademarks and right of publicity laws brought by celebrities and rights owners.

The top student of the course (based on the highest overall mark obtained) will receive the MediaCorp Prize in Entertainment Law valued at S$1000.

This course introduces you to the cultural and social significance of fashion, and discusses the intellectual property (IP) laws relevant to the fashion industry. The laws governing the fashion industry are a complex web of laws that include contract, company, employment, insurance, trade laws, but a 5-credit elective will not be able to cover this entire range. Therefore the focus will only be on IP laws. Before delving into the legal doctrines, you will first be familiarised with an interdisciplinary approach – through readings in fashion theory and cultural studies – that will provide you with an understanding of why we dress the way we dress, and how dress codes can have a communicative dimension that can attract the protection of a constitutional right to freedom of expression.

IP laws such as copyright, trademarks, design and geographical indications will be covered, and this course aims to give you a broad understanding of these IP rights drawing from cases in a number of different jurisdictions, i.e. it is not a course on Singapore law.

Case studies covered will span the spectrum of copyright infringement lawsuits against Balenciaga and Guess, trademark registrations by Off-White and Hermes, trademark infringement and dilution claims by Rolex, Christian Louboutin and Tiffany & Co, as well as fashion trends such as counterfeit chic and self-hacking.

The digital economy has expanded significantly in recent years but shifts away from the 20th century approach to globalization, captured by industrial policy and restrictions on trade and investment linked to national security, have altered how economic relations are regulated. Less market-focused, the ‘new Washington Consensus’ is predicated on support for strategic industries to reduce dependencies along with strategic alliance-building. This course will develop skills in understanding the multilateral and regional legal frameworks which underpin the global digital economy and in assessing how they have been adapted to address the challenges of a new technological era.

This course deals with the central commercial aspects of intellectual property (IP) ownership and places emphasis on understanding the functioning of the license mechanism and the variations thereof and working with the licensing of IP and related rights. To complement this, the strategic management of IP licenses as well as other forms of IP contracts and agreements will be discussed. In order to provide students with a close-to-real-life experience in dealmaking, students will engage with each other in a license negotiation exercise, culminating in the creation of a draft license agreement.

NUS Compulsory Core Law Curriculum or common law equivalent.
Students should have completed either: (1) Law of Intellectual Property at undergraduate level or (2) LL5070/LL5070V Foundations of IP Law

This course aims to introduce students to privacy and data protection law. The bulk of this course will be centred on Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act 2012; students should emerge from this course equipped to advise on the various practical issues that modern organisations face when dealing with personal data. In addition, students will also be introduced to data protection regulation at the international level, through comparisons with other data protection laws in major jurisdictions (such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and China’s Personal Information Protection Law).