Simon Chesterman is Dean of the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law. This site has information about his books and articles, courses that he teaches, and career advice.
A Chat Room of One’s Own
The Internet has had a greater impact on access to information than any development in human history, with the possible exception of the invention of writing. We are more connected and better informed than ever before. So why does it often feel like what takes place on the Internet is so dumb? Two thousand years [...]
Why Study?
With the release of A-level results earlier this month, students across Singapore — and their parents — are contemplating the next step in their education. Nearly 30 percent of the cohort will go to one of Singapore’s five autonomous universities, a number set to grow to 40 percent by 2020. With a further 10 percent [...]
Climate Change: What Do We Owe the Future?
The bushfires that continue to ravage Victoria and New South Wales this Australia Day have added another nail in the climate change sceptics’ coffin: the temperature on the ground was literally off the charts. Previously capped at 50 degrees centigrade, Australia’s meteorologists recently had to add two new colours — deep purple and pink — [...]
After Privacy: The Rise of Facebook, The Fall of WikiLeaks, and Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act 2012
This article discusses the changing ways in which information is produced, stored, and shared—exemplified by the rise of social-networking sites like Facebook and controversies over the activities of WikiLeaks—and the implications for privacy and data protection. Legal protections of privacy have always been reactive, but the coherence of any legal regime has also been undermined [...]
How Best to Protect Kids Online
How many “friends” does your child have online? Who reads her blog or sees the pictures she uploads? And what survey forms is she filling in to win a chance at a prize? Some parents will know some of the answers to some of these questions. But it is highly unlikely that any parents would [...]
Snowplough Parenting
Next week around 12,000 Singaporeans enter our university system. These students are privileged in many senses of the word. But their entry to university may have been helped by factors that will ultimately limit their ability to succeed. For many students, the path to university was made easier by hyper-attentive parents and an army of [...]
Who Killed Privacy?
It is more than a decade since the former CEO of Sun Microsystems infamously declared that privacy was dead, urging the reporters who had asked him about the subject to “get over it”. That was before the launch of Facebook, Google’s Street View, the iPhone, and a proliferation of other tools that many saw as [...]
Academic Freedom in New Haven and Singapore
On April 5, Yale faculty will vote on a resolution challenging the Yale-NUS College, the liberal arts programme that will admit its first students in August 2013. The resolution reflects three distinct concerns about the joint venture. The first is an internal matter to Yale and relates to the decision not to seek a formal [...]
One Nation Under Surveillance
What limits, if any, should be placed on a government’s efforts to spy on its citizens in the name of national security? Spying on foreigners has long been regarded as an unseemly but necessary enterprise. Spying on one’s own citizens in a democracy, by contrast, has historically been subject to various forms of legal and [...]
