In August 2025, two research centres from the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore – the Centre for Technology, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence & the Law (“TRAIL”) and the EW Barker Centre for Law & Business – partnered with research centres from Columbia, Oxford and Tsinghua to co‑organise a truly transnational two‑day conference marking the first‑ever academic collaboration of its kind across these leading global institutions. Titled “Intellectual Property and Technology in the 21st Century: Challenges in the Next Decade”, the conference discussed how intellectual property (“IP”) laws can better deal with disruptive technology trends. The conference was also supported by partners such as Google, ByteDance, the Singapore Academy of Law and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (“IPOS”).

One of the biggest lessons I learnt in law school was that the law never happens in a vacuum, and in these times of geopolitical tension, economic uncertainty, societal stress and technological acceleration, context matters more than ever. Therefore, I hope in this keynote to provide some context to the discussions that will take place over the next two days.

The advent of sophisticated AI-driven voice cloning has brought to the fore critical legal and ethical challenges regarding the protection of vocal identity. Prompted by recent controversies – including the striking resemblance between OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o voice and that of Scarlett Johansson – this article examines how generative AI technologies undermine the unique value of the human voice and further complicate the legal questions surrounding personal identity. Through a comparative analysis, the paper evaluates three principal legal frameworks: the right of publicity, personality rights, and the personal data protection right. Each framework – rooted in different legal traditions – offers distinct strengths and limitations in addressing the threats posed by AI-generated voice cloning. By analysing these doctrines’ scope, remedies, and posthumous protections, the study offers a foundation for understanding how existing legal approaches may be applied to the evolving challenges of vocal identity in the era of generative AI.

Prompt-based AI creativity is redefining how expressive works are produced, posing novel challenges for copyright law. This article identifies three major obstacles standing in the way of AI copyrightability. First, the lack of meaningful human control in prompt-based AI creation undercuts the traditional requirement of human authorship. The cross-categorical nature of generative AI outputs also exposes a fundamental mismatch with copyright’s theoretical design. Second, recognising copyright in machine-created outputs risks creating unjustified windfalls for users who claim authorship without true creative contribution, undermining copyright’s incentive structure. Third, protecting AI outputs under copyright without distinction has broader creative and social consequences, including cognitive offloading, reduced authenticity, and stagnation in artistic diversity, which could erode the value of human creativity. This article recommends that future regulation preserve human-centred authorship in copyright law, implement transparency mechanisms for AI-assisted creations, and avoid overextending copyright in ways that erode the value of human creativity.

Although Singapore has legalised sports betting since 1999 and the sector involves billions of dollars, it lacks specific legislation regulating the misuse of inside information in sports betting, one of the two most common forms of match manipulation observed internationally and a recognised money laundering risk. This regulatory gap could be exploited, especially as developments in other jurisdictions reveal emerging legal and policy challenges that Singapore’s existing anti-corruption laws cannot fully address. These implications remain unexamined in the Singapore context and this article seeks to fill that gap by examining these challenges, identifying existing regulatory approaches, and proposing a Hybrid Information-Connected Approach, inspired by Singapore’s financial insider trading laws, for Singapore to consider adopting. By identifying and defining this hybrid approach, this article aims to contribute a framework for future regulatory development in sports betting and support Singapore’s efforts to uphold sports integrity and strengthen its anti-money laundering regime.

Fundamentals of Criminal Law (“Fundamentals”) was completed in Singapore during lockdown in 2020. But it will never really be finished. The project that it undertakes is sufficiently wide-ranging that there will always be opportunities for disagreement and refinement. Even if one accepts its core informing principles, eg that D should not be convicted of a criminal wrong unless D is culpable for that wrong, one might well harbour doubts about how those principles apply in the context of particular doctrines. Can inadvertent negligence be culpable, for instance, in the way that many legal systems assume it is? In his essay for this symposium, James Manwaring does not deny that it can: “Sometimes inattention and forgetfulness evidence insufficient care for others.” But he denies that the evidential link is a robust one. Drawing on recent studies in the psychological literature, he concludes that such failings of attention or memory, relative to an average person, do not supply robust evidence of a moral failing on D’s part. More specifically, they do not offer sufficiently reliable evidence of D’s culpability to warrant the kind of condemnatory and punitive response that is inflicted by criminal law. “From the fact that the defendant failed to do what the reasonable person would do, it requires a fragile inference to reach the conclusion that they evinced insufficient care [for the interests of those they harmed].” Yet Manwaring accepts that the inference may be strengthened by relativising the so-called “reasonable person” to more of the defendant’s own attributes. He does not offer an account of how that might be done; such an account would be well beyond the scope of a single essay. What he does show, however, is that the existing literature is incomplete. There is more work to be done.

The following is an edited transcript of a filmed interview I did with Professor Lee Sheridan on 29 December 2014 at his home in Cardiff, Wales. I first met Sheridan back in 1985 when I was a law student at the Faculty of Law, National University Singapore. At the time, I worked through the Law Club to launch a series of lunch-time lectures and talks and through the good offices of Professor Tommy Koh, was able to invite Sheridan to deliver one of these talks. Over the years, I have had many correspondences and interviews with Sheridan. As a result, parts of this particular interview sound like half-finished conversations from an earlier time. I decided to leave them be, rather than edit them out as it gives the reader a better 'feel' of the Sheridan charm and mystique. I do not cover the entirety of Sheridan's academic life or work as that has already been comprehensively documented in Andrew Phang, “Founding Father and Legal Scholar: The Life and Work of Professor LA Sheridan" [1999] Sing JLS 335. What follows is a recollection of the early days of Sheridan's life and of his journey to Singapore to establish its first law school.

Since the crypto winter began in early 2022, several market crashes and institutional collapses have ravaged the innovative financial ecosystem. Among global regulators, the major discourse is no longer the full prohibition of crypto-related activities but the protection of traditional financial systems from a “great” crypto crisis capable of disrupting financial stability. However, existing regulatory frameworks lack clarity on major aspects of the crypto ecosystem, especially relating to new associational risks and its potential to drive systemic risks among crypto conglomerates. This article examines the anatomy of recent crypto crashes and highlights the limitations of existing global regulatory developments toward preventing these threats from potentially spreading to traditional financial systems. To these emerging concerns, the article argues for the adoption of an entity-based approach to crypto regulations. Specifically, it proposes the application of adjusted prudential regulations to a new category of systemically important crypto intermediaries (SICIs) like traditional systemic institutions.