Simon Chesterman | |
---|---|
Born | 1973 (age 50–51) |
Nationality | Australian |
Alma mater | University of Melbourne (BA, LLB) Magdalen College, Oxford (PhD) Beijing International Studies University |
Employer | National University of Singapore |
Notable work | We, the Robots? (2021) One Nation Under Surveillance (2011) Law and Practice of the United Nations (with Thomas M. Franck and David M. Malone, 2008) You, The People (2004) Just War or Just Peace? (2001) |
Spouse | Ming Tan |
Website | www |
Simon Chesterman PPA(P) is an Australian legal academic and writer who is currently a vice provost at the National University of Singapore and dean of the NUS College. He was the dean of NUS Faculty of Law from 2012 to 2022. He is also senior director of AI governance at AI Singapore, editor of the Asian Journal of International Law and co-president of the Law Schools Global League.
A Rhodes Scholar, Chesterman succeeded Tan Cheng Han as Dean of the NUS Faculty of Law on 1 January 2012. [1] Prior to January 2012, he was global professor and director of the New York University School of Law Singapore programme. [2] His research concerns international law, public authority, data protection, and the regulation of artificial intelligence. He is critical of what he sees as the changing and increasingly expanding role of intelligence agencies. [3] Chesterman is the author or editor of twenty books and four novels.
In 2013, Chesterman was appointed as a member of Singapore's Data Protection Advisory Committee, [4] and in 2016 joined the United Nations University Council. [5] From 2012 to 2017, he served as secretary-general of the Asian Society of International Law.
Chesterman attended Camberwell Grammar School and graduated with first class honours in arts and law from the University of Melbourne, where he won the Supreme Court Prize as the top student, and was editor of the Melbourne University Law Review . He obtained a Rhodes Scholarship and completed his doctorate in international law at the University of Oxford under the supervision of the late Sir Ian Brownlie. [1] He also holds a diploma in Chinese language from the Beijing International Studies University. [6] Chesterman's play "Everything Before the 'But' Is a Lie" was performed at Oxford's Burton Taylor Studio in 2000. It was directed by Rosamund Pike, who was then an undergraduate student at Oxford. [7]
Chesterman is a founding editor of the Asian Journal of International Law , published from 2011 by Cambridge University Press.[ citation needed ] He is on the editorial boards of other journals including Global Governance , [8] Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, [9] Security Dialogue, [10] and The Hague Journal on the Rule of Law. [11]
As Dean of NUS Law, Chesterman oversaw the first review of its curriculum in more than a decade. Changes introduced included greater exposure to the legal systems of Asia and a grade-free first semester. [12]
Chesterman also launched the most ambitious research agenda in the history of the faculty. [13] This entailed the creation of a series of new centres: the Centre for Asian Legal Studies, the EW Barker Centre for Law & Business, the Centre for Banking & Finance Law, the Centre for Maritime Law, the Centre for Legal Theory, and the Centre for Technology, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence & the Law. [14] This was said to be aimed at making Singapore a "thought leader" in legal research. [15] [ who? ]
Fundraising efforts included support from Singapore's Ministry of Law for the new research centres, as well as $21m to name the Centre for Law & Business after former Law Minister Edmund W. Barker. [16] Four new endowed chairs were established: the Sat Pal Khattar Chair in Tax Law, the Amaladass Chair in Criminal Justice, the MPA Chair in Maritime Law, and the Saw Swee Hock Centennial Professorship. [17]
A push to increase experiential learning and ethics included the introduction of a mandatory pro bono scheme in 2014 and the creation of a Centre for Pro Bono & Clinical Legal Education in 2017. [18]
In September 2013, NUS Law convened the first ever Global Law Deans' Forum of the International Association of Law Schools. The meeting adopted the Singapore Declaration on Global Standards and Outcomes of a Legal Education, [19] which was intended to offer a "common language" for global legal education. [20] [ vague ]
Under Chesterman's leadership, NUS Law rose from 22nd in the QS World Rankings in 2013 to 10th in 2021, [21] in the process overtaking Hong Kong University's faculty of law to become the top-ranked law school in Asia. [22]
Chesterman was appointed as dean of NUS Law for a fourth term in 2021, and will serve until 30 June 2023, after Professor Hans Tjio, who was appointed to be the next dean in July 2021, relinquished the position for medical reasons. [23] In the same year, he launched an initiative to increase diversity in the law school by shortlisting top students from all of Singapore's schools and increasing the technology component of the curriculum. [24]
His doctoral thesis as a Rhodes Scholar, became one of his first books, Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law. [25] Before publication as a book, the work had originally won a 2000 Dasturzada Dr Jal Pavry Memorial Prize for "best thesis in international relations". [26] One review article of this book by Nico Krisch in the European Journal of International Law described Chesterman's book as being pessimistic about humanitarian intervention, when compared to his contemporary Nicholas J. Wheeler who is more optimistic about establishing an international framework for "ideal humanitarian intervention".
Chesterman does not believe that "ideal humanitarian intervention" exists; according to Krisch, he instead belongs to the school of thought that argues that states should "justify their action based on political arguments" rather than relying on a "[humanitarian] recognition of exception to the use of force". Though the intervention would go against international law, it would be in Chesterman's words, a "venial sin". [27] As Krisch analyses, Wheeler also raises "plausible" opposition to this – it would create a "perception" that "powerful states" could ignore international law whenever they wished, pushing other countries to treat international law "equally cavalierly". Noting Chesterman's position, Krisch writes, "law loses much of its weight if its deviation from moral standards is openly admitted and other ways of justification are recognised." Chesterman further argues in Just War or Just Peace that the enforcement of the Iraqi no-fly zones and the Operation Deny Flight (the no-fly zone in Kosovo) went outside the framework of the United Nations, but Krisch calls this claim "overstated". Nevertheless, the book received an American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit. [28]
In Just War or Just Peace, Chesterman rejects the idea that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY)'s repression of the Kosovars represented a "supreme humanitarian emergency". Instead, as Nicholas Wheeler notes, Chesterman is "sympathetic" to Russia's historical argument before the Security Council (SC) "that the crisis did not merit an armed response". Going against the widely accepted view is that Russia's threat to use its UN Security Council veto against UN intervention in Kosovo was an act of "mere contrariness" to NATO, Chesterman instead argues NATO "never seriously contemplated that there might be genuine objections to the policies of NATO member states in their dealings with [the FRY]." Chesterman and his allies, Wheeler writes, would actually believe that Russia's official SC position matched its actual belief on the matter; to Chesterman, Russia would have changed its position had the situation "worsened along the apocalyptic lines predicted by NATO governments". [29]
Nevertheless, writing in the journal International Affairs, Wheeler concluded that "Chesterman has written a tour de force that exposes the weaknesses of the arguments supporting a doctrine of unilateral humanitarian intervention in international society ... Chesterman rejects the claim that states have a legal right to act as vigilantes in support of Council resolutions, even if they believe that this is the only means to stop a genocide. The powerfully argued thesis of this scholarly work is that accepting this proposition in law is 'a recipe for bad policy, bad law, and a bad international order'." [30]
As a Modern Law Review article noted, Chesterman condemned NATO's intervention in the Kosovo War as being "completely outside the United Nations system of security and a threat to global stability". [31] He later drew parallels between Kosovo and the arguments raised by Russia for its 2014 annexation of Crimea. [32]
Chesterman's book You, The People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building (Oxford University Press, 2004), [33] studies the foundation of new institutions in war-torn regions such as the former Yugoslavia and southeast Asia. Noting Chesterman's intent to highlight the mutually related yet sometimes mutually opposing "ends of liberal democracy and the means of benevolent autocracy," a review article in the George Washington International Law Review called it a "misdelivered message". [34] It was reviewed positively in the New York Review of Books by Brian Urquhart who wrote that "the weight of the subject and the depth of the research are supported by wit, candor, brevity, and analytical writing of a very high order." [35] Another review in Human Rights Quarterly stated that the book "speaks with the authority of a major global commission study and offers analyses and prescriptions with important implications for human rights scholars and practitioners." [36]
Chesterman has written on the regulation and oversight of intelligence services, including a monograph published by Australia's Lowy Institute for International Policy in 2016. [37] In an opinion piece published in the global edition of The New York Times in November 2009, he argued for limits to the outsourcing of intelligence activities to private contractors such as Blackwater. [38]
Oxford University Press published Chesterman's twelfth book in March 2011. Entitled One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty , it examines what limits – if any – should be placed on a government's efforts to spy on its citizens in the name of national security. [39] [40] Writing in the New York Review of Books , David D. Cole said that Chesterman "argues convincingly that the specter of catastrophic terrorist attacks creates extraordinary pressure for intrusive monitoring; that technological advances have made the collection and analysis of vast amounts of previously private information entirely feasible; and that in a culture transformed by social media, in which citizens are increasingly willing to broadcast their innermost thoughts and acts, privacy may already be as outmoded as chivalry." [41]
In January 2014, Chesterman published an edited volume entitled Data Protection Law in Singapore: Privacy and Sovereignty in an Interconnected World (Singapore: Academy Publishing, 2014). [42]
He is also the author of We, the Robots? Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). [43]
Chesterman has been author or co-author of various reports for the United Nations, governments, and private bodies. Examples include:
Other publications have focused on the United Nations, particularly the role of its Secretary-General, [47] and the rise and regulation of private military and security companies. [48]
Chesterman is married to Ming Tan, daughter of former President of Singapore, Tony Tan. [49]
The National University of Singapore (NUS) is a national public collegiate and research university in Singapore. It was officially established in 1980 by the merger of the University of Singapore and Nanyang University.
Shunmugam Jayakumar, often known as S. Jayakumar, is a Singaporean former politician, diplomat, lawyer and author who served as Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore between 2004 and 2009. A member of the governing People's Action Party (PAP), he was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bedok SMC between 1980 and 1988, the Bedok division of Bedok GRC between 1988 and 1997, and later East Coast GRC between 1997 and 2011.
Walter Woon Cheong Ming is a Singaporean lawyer who served as the fifth attorney-general of Singapore between 2008 and 2010. He is currently an Emeritus Professor at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law, Lee Kong Chian Visiting professor at the Singapore Management University Yong Pung How School of Law, and the dean of the RHT Legal Training Institute.
Kishore Mahbubani is a Singaporean diplomat and geopolitical consultant who served as Singapore Permanent Representative to the United Nations between 1984 and 1989, and again between 1998 and 2004, and President of the United Nations Security Council between 2001 and 2002.
Humanitarian intervention is the use or threat of military force by a state across borders with the intent of ending severe and widespread human rights violations in a state which has not given permission for the use of force. Humanitarian interventions are aimed at ending human rights violations of individuals other than the citizens of the intervening state. Humanitarian interventions are only intended to prevent human rights violations in extreme circumstances. Attempts to establish institutions and political systems to achieve positive outcomes in the medium- to long-run, such as peacekeeping, peace-building and development aid, do not fall under this definition of a humanitarian intervention.
The National University of Singapore Faculty of Law is Singapore's oldest law school. NUS Law was initially established in 1956 as the Department of Law in the University of Malaya. After its establishment, NUS Law was Singapore's only law school for half a century, until the subsequent establishment of the SMU School of Law in 2007 and the SUSS School of Law in 2017. NUS Law is currently located at the NUS Bukit Timah Campus. The current dean of NUS Law is Andrew Simester. Internationally, NUS Law has been ranked twelfth by the QS World University Rankings by Subject in 2023 and eleventh by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings by Subject in 2024.
The Westphalian system, also known as Westphalian sovereignty, is a principle in international law that each state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory. The principle developed in Europe after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, based on the state theory of Jean Bodin and the natural law teachings of Hugo Grotius. It underlies the modern international system of sovereign states and is enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which states that "nothing ... shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state."
Human rights in Singapore are codified in the Constitution of Singapore, which sets out the legal rights of its citizens. These rights are protected by the Constitution and include amendments and referendums. These rights have evolved significantly from the days since independence, though the government in Singapore has broad powers to possibly limit citizens' rights or to inhibit political opposition. In 2018, Singapore was ranked 151st by Reporters Without Borders in the Worldwide Press Freedom Index. U.S.-based Freedom in the World scored Singapore 4 out of 7 for "political rights", and 4 out of 7 for "civil liberties", with an overall ranking of "partly free" for the year 2015.
Thio Li-ann is a Singaporean law professor at the National University of Singapore. She was educated at the University of Oxford, Harvard Law School and the University of Cambridge. In January 2007, she was appointed a Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP) in Singapore's 11th Parliament.
Benedict William Kingsbury is Vice Dean and Director of the Institute for International Law and Justice at New York University and a leading scholar in international law and diplomacy. He was recently also announced as a faculty director for the new NYU Law Guarini Institute for Global Legal Studies. Born in Holland and raised in Hamilton, New Zealand he was a Rhodes Scholar in 1982, a commercial law graduate from Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand and a doctor of International Relations and Law at Balliol College, University of Oxford. He lectured at Oxford University and Duke University prior to his New York University Law School appointment. He is an honorary citizen of San Ginesio in Italy, the birthplace of Alberico Gentili (1552-1608). He received an honorary doctorate in law from Tilburg University in 2016. From 2013 to 2018 he was joint Editor in Chief of the American Journal of International Law. He received NYU Law School's Podell Distinguished Teaching Award in 2019.
Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah is a legal academic. He is an Emeritus Professor and former C. J. Koh Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore, the Tunku Abdul Rahman Professor of Law at the University of Malaya, and the former head of the school of law at the University of Tasmania. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Human Rights, London School of Economics. He has been arbitrator, counsel or expert in several leading investment arbitrations.
Simon Tay Seong Chee is a Singaporean lawyer and legal academic who served as a Nominated Member of Parliament between 1997 and 2003.
One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty is a book by Simon Chesterman, Dean and Professor at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law.
The Yong Pung How School of Law is one of the six schools of the Singapore Management University. It was set up as Singapore's second law school in 2007, 50 years after the NUS Faculty of Law and 10 years before SUSS School of Law. Prior to its establishment as a law school, the school was a department within the School of Business between 2000 and 2007. The school was known as the SMU School of Law until 2021, when it was renamed after former Chief Justice Yong Pung How.
The Asian Journal of International Law is a peer-reviewed law review focusing on public and private international law. It is an official publication of the Asian Society of International Law and is published by Cambridge University Press. It is produced by the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law and succeeds the Singapore Year Book of International Law. The editors-in-chief are Antony Anghie, Simon Chesterman, and Tan Hsien-Li.
The Asia Cup Moot, or Asia Cup in short, is an annual international moot court competition that is open to law schools in Asia. The competition inaugurated in 1999 and is held in Tokyo, Japan. It is jointly organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan and the Japanese Society of International Law, and the moot problem typically contains issues pertaining to public international law, international humanitarian law, and international human rights. The top 16 teams based on memorial scores qualify for the international rounds in Tokyo, but generally each country except Japan is only permitted to send one team. Each team may feature up to four oralists. As of 2023, 61 different law schools have competed in Tokyo since the moot's inception.
The International Association of Law Schools (IALS) is an independent association of law schools that was established after a series of meetings of legal educators from around the world beginning in 2000. Incorporated under the laws of the District of Columbia in the United States in 2005, its secretariat is based at Cornell Law School. Its membership includes over 170 schools from more than 45 countries.
Nico Krisch is a legal scholar, specializing in international law, constitutional theory, and global governance. He is professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Previously, he was research professor at the ICREA, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals, and a Fellow at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. He has also been a professor of international law at the Hertie School, a senior lecturer at the Law Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a research fellow at Merton College (Oxford), New York University School of Law and the Max Planck Institute for International Law in Heidelberg. He has also been a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School.
David Tan is a Singaporean law professor at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law. He was the Vice Dean of Academic Affairs from January 2015 to June 2021. His legal scholarship covers intellectual and intangible property law. He is also a fine art and fashion photographer, with exhibitions presented by Cartier and Versace.
Jeffrey PinslerSCPBM is a Singaporean legal academic and lawyer. He was appointed an Emeritus Professor at the National University of Singapore's Faculty of Law in May 2022, having previously served as the Geoffrey Bartholomew Professor of Law and Senior Professorial Fellow of the Singapore Institute of Legal Education. In his time at NUS, Pinsler has served as Vice Dean, Chair of the Faculty Search Committee and was also a member of the University's Board of Discipline. In August 2022, he concurrently took on an appointment as a consultant at Drew & Napier.
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