Teaching comparative law in Singapore: Global and local challenges

• Main Authors: HARDING, Andrew, DE VISSER, Maartje
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: Comparative and Foreign Law; Legal Education
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sol_research/2512; https://search.library.smu.edu.sg/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma99226212402601&context=L&vid=65SMU_INST:SMU_NUI&lang=en&search_scope=Everything&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=Everything&query=any,contains,Legal%20education%20in%20Asia:%20From%20imitation%20to%20innovation&offset=0
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In the 21st century it has become impossible for law schools across the globe to ignore two important, and interrelated, contemporary trends in the law. The first is that law no longer necessarily stops, as it used to, at national borders: many countries contemplate, for example, the extra-territorial application of their regimes governing areas such as competition, corruption or the environment. The second is that legal practice is becoming increasingly globalised as a result of a growing incidence of cross-border transactions, capital flows and migration. It is clear that an overwhelming majority of law schools have been compelled to re-examine their curriculum in light of the new and tight embrace between law and global processes, with a View to preparing their graduates for a world of law that looks increasingly and radically different from the one in which most of their teachers were themselves educated.In the case of Singapore, this logic of legal globalisation is even more compelling than it might be elsewhere. As a small city-state of less than six million people with no natural resources, and a developed, highly sophisticated, service-driven economy, Singapore is already highly integrated with the rest of Asia and the global economy. It has extensive economic, cultural, and even familial links to most of the surrounding ASEAN countries (especially Malaysia), which themselves are integrating rapidly, and farther afield to China, India, North-East Asia, and other parts of the world. This state of affairs reflects, to a considerable extent, a deliberate policy choice: Singapore has the ambition to be - and already is in many ways — a legal hub for Asia, with expanding arbitration work,1 and now an international commercial court populated by international judges drawn from foreign common and civil law