Law and Practice of the United Nations (3rd edition)
A new edition of Law and Practice of the United Nations for a new and troubling age. When I first spoke with the late, great Thomas M. Franck about turning his famous course on the constitutional law of the UN into a textbook, he said he was wary because he regarded such books as boomerangs: […] more…
Misinformation, Disinformation, and the Crisis of Trust in Public Institutions
[United Nations University] Misinformation and disinformation are not simply problems of false content or content moderation. They are multilevel governance failure. Data practices and platform architectures shape how manipulation spreads. Governments regulate, sometimes crudely. Researchers often lack the access needed to understand systemic risks. And the consequences are felt across climate action, public health, elections, […] more…
AI Companions Are Coming — Privacy Rules Are Not Ready
[Straits Times] AI companions need more than rules about data protection. They need boundaries. In Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV frames artificial intelligence as more than a technological challenge: AI calls into question the value and worth of the human person. The parallel with Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 response to […] more…
Building AI the World Can Actually Trust
At the recent ATxSummit here in Singapore, I had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Yoshua Bengio — Turing Award-winning scientist and the first living scholar to pass one million Google Scholar citations. (I gather this tally is beaten only by Michel Foucault, but what has he written lately?) As AI systems become more capable, autonomous, […] more…
Teaching Undergraduates the Art of Survival in Unsettled Times
[Straits Times, with Daniel Goh & Loy Hui Chieh] What happens when a university sends its students into the real world to see if they can act and adapt when there is no obvious script to follow? At a recent job interview, a candidate was asked a question that would have been unthinkable not […] more…
Artificial Intelligence as a Stress Test for the Social Contract of Higher Education
The relationship between universities and the societies that fund them has historically rested on an implicit social contract: public investment and institutional autonomy in exchange for economic growth, social mobility, and civic contribution. This article develops a conceptual framework for analysing how that settlement is being renegotiated under conditions of technological disruption and shifting governance […] more…
Research Integrity and Academic Authority in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: From Discovery to Curation?
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the organization and practice of research in ways that extend far beyond gains in productivity. AI systems now accelerate discovery, reorganize scholarly labour, and mediate access to expanding scientific literatures. At the same time, generative models capable of producing text, images, and data at scale introduce new epistemic and institutional vulnerabilities. […] more…
Will AI make EQ more important than IQ?
[Straits Times, with Loy Hui Chieh] Artificial intelligence will soon surpass knowledge workers in most tasks for which they are trained. Should universities switch from educating the mind to educating the heart? November 30 marks the second anniversary of the release of ChatGPT — though few professors will be celebrating. As the large language model […] more…
I Prompt, Therefore I Am
[The IT Society] When people think of risks associated with artificial intelligence (AI), Hollywood looms large. Movies have long conjured the worst case scenarios: from Hal refusing to open the pod bay doors in 2001, to a murderous Arnold Schwarzenegger travelling back through time. If there is a robot apocalypse, however, it is unlikely to […] more…
Meritocracy 2.0
[Straits Times] Traditional measures of merit have served their purpose. Enabling everyone to flourish — even as artificial intelligence threatens to outshine us all — requires that we diversify those yardsticks, while also being clear that they should not define a person’s worth or limit their potential. It’s admissions season for universities and, as […] more…
Can Universities Teach Students to Be Good?
[Straits Times] University marks the time when students take more responsibility for their educational journey. Is that the best time to impart values? Or the worst? Recent debates in Singapore about cheating by aspiring lawyers during the bar exam could be the tip of the iceberg. Around the world, the swift move to online […] more…
We Need to Move Beyond the Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Debate
[THE] Academics are agonising over the wrong elements of online education. They should be thinking about active versus passive learning. Over the course of the pandemic, educators – like everyone else – were forced to rethink the way in which we do our job. And, like most people, we responded by seeing how we […] more…
Rethinking University Education
[Straits Times] Computers know everything and artificial intelligence is acquiring the skills to apply that knowledge. What is there left to teach? Once upon a time, education meant the transmission of knowledge. Teachers and professors like me were in possession of that knowledge, and we were paid by students (or their parents, or the […] more…
The Curious Case of How Big Firm Lawyers and Female Lawyers Perform in Court
[Straits Times] Does the quality of a lawyer affect your chances of winning a case in court? Should it? Earlier this week, non-essential court proceedings resumed in Singapore after two months on hold due to the Covid-19 circuit breaker. In most cases, lawyers will continue to appear remotely before judges via teleconference. Trying to […] more…
Are University Students Products or Customers?
[Straits Times] The Times Higher Education World Academic Summit begins today in Singapore, including the launch tomorrow night of the World University Rankings 2019. But how should we value a university education? Discussion about proposed changes to the pathway to legal practice in Singapore has tended to focus on whether this will make it […] more…
That’s Academic
[Straits Times] Earlier this month the National University of Singapore announced that in place of a three- or four-year programme leading to a degree, the University would commit itself to a two-decade relationship with students. Is it time to rethink the role of higher education? For centuries, universities have operated on the assumption that […] more…
The Fall and Rise of Legal Education in Singapore
The sixtieth anniversary of legal education in Singapore offers a chance to look back on the history of the rule of law in Singapore — and forward to how the practice of law is changing. Six decades ago, the first law students enrolled as colonial subjects in the new Department of Law of the University […] more…
The Fall and Rise of Legal Education in Singapore
[Singapore Journal of Legal Studies] Prior to independence, legal education was all but non-existent in Singapore and many other colonies. This essay briefly discusses that colonial context before going on to describe how the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law came to play an important part in Singapore’s rule of law story as Singapore’s […] more…
What’s in a Name?
Last Monday, the National University of Singapore named its Centre for Law & Business after EW Barker, Singapore’s longest-serving Minister for Law. The Prime Minister and members of the Barker family attended the launch. A day earlier, on the other side of the world, the United Nations withdrew its support of a West Bank Palestinian women’s […] more…
Don’t Study Law
Students across Singapore are currently considering university programmes in which they have been offered a place. They routinely seek advice from family and friends, as well as attending open houses and reading materials on official Web sites and social media. But what if they could give themselves advice? Letters of the Law is a student-led […] more…
The Fall and Rise of Legal Education in Asia: Inhibition, Imitation, Innovation
The history of legal education in Asia bears the scars of colonialism. The most obvious evidence of that today lies in the common law/civil law divide between our various countries, a distinction for which the determining factor was typically the legal system of the European power that happened to exercise colonial power. In recent years, […] more…
Too Many Lawyers?
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Every lawyer is familiar with Dick the Butcher’s line from Shakespeare’s “Henry VI, Part 2”. Most also appreciate its double significance. Typically the line is invoked in jest — a shorthand example of the many jokes about lawyers that accuse our profession of being something […] more…
In Praise of Failure
It is graduation season in Singapore and many other parts of the world, as enthusiastic young men and women celebrate the completion of their degrees and diplomas. As is customary, we send these students out into the world with parting words of advice and, hopefully, wisdom. Much of this advice can seem generic, but last […] more…
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 […] more…
How Best to Protect Kids Online
[Straits Times] 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 […] more…
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 […] more…
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 vote […] more…
Studying Law at University
Do you want to do well in Law from day one? Law is a challenging and competitive subject to study at university. You need to become familiar with its peculiar language and complicated practices as quickly as possible if you want to do well. Drawing on the experiences of hundreds of students, Studying Law at […] more…
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