[5 January 2007]
New School of Law at SMU to add diversity in legal education

Contextualized teaching of law will produce lawyers ready for corporate and commercial practice

Singapore, 5 January 2007 Singapore Management University (SMU) announced today that its fifth school, the new School of Law will admit 90 students in its first cohort for the Academic Year starting August 2007. As Singapore's first private university and the only university here with a city campus purpose-built to its pedagogy of small class sizes and interactive learning, SMU will be extending its unique approach to its new School of Law.

Leveraging on its existing strengths in business and finance, and the SMU brand of education which serves a select, smaller cohort of students, the university is offering a four-year single law degree and a five-year double degree programme that stands apart in several ways. SMU law undergraduates will pursue a rigorous legal curriculum which trains them to have a contextualized and practice-oriented understanding of the workings of the business world. Some highlights of the unique curriculum include:

? Students take a suite of 17 compulsory law core courses which will provide a strong, mandatory foundation for corporate and commercial practice in Singapore and the region. These include Law & Regulation, Commercial Conflict of Laws, Comparative Legal Systems and Economic Analysis of Law.

? Conventionally described as Company Law, this compulsory course will be taught separately as Law of Business Organisations and Corporate Law given its central importance to commercial and corporate law practice. Law of Business Organisations covers areas of study such as sole proprietorships, limited liability partnerships and corporations, business trusts and unit trusts, succession and insolvency issues. Corporate Law covers corporate governance, duties and liabilities of company directors, and corporate insolvency and restructuring.

? Another suite of 12 law electives focus on commercial and corporate law practice ranging from Banking Law, Financial & Securities Regulation, Insolvency Law, Intellectual Property Law, Tax Law, Insurance Law as well as one on Directed Research which allows students to undertake a research project and study a suitable law topic more deeply under the supervision of a faculty member.

? Students will be required to take a significant proportion of non-law courses in the SMU law curriculum. The compulsory component of 11 non-law courses aims to provide SMU law students with a keen understanding of the context and environment within which law functions and to make them holistic law graduates. Finance and Financial Accounting are valuable tools for lawyers in corporate and commercial practice. Ethics & Social Responsibility helps students appreciate the ethical and social dimensions of business as well as professional practice. The Business Study Mission, which involves a visit to an overseas country to study its business and regulatory environment, and Introduction to Asian Modern History, Politics and Economics, together provide a keen understanding of the complexities of the global landscape and give the student excellent preparation for doing business or working in the region. Life skills courses, Finishing Touch and Work & Family, help students acquire business etiquette skills and a work-life balance.

? Students will also benefit from a mandatory 10-week internship with a law firm or government legal agency as it will acquaint them to the practical workings of the legal system and the realities of law practice in the private and public sectors, as well as expose them to the nature of regulatory work.

? Opportunity for SMU undergraduates to combine Law with one of SMU's existing degree programmes in Business Management, Accountancy, Economics, Social Science and Information Systems Management under the new five-year double degree programme.

With Singapore poised to become a global city, SMU looks forward to playing our role in redefining the pedagogy that is most relevant to the socio-economic needs. With the new School of Law, we are excited also to have the opportunity to add further diversity to Singapore's legal education landscape, said Professor Howard Hunter, President of SMU.

According to Professor Hunter, SMU aims to develop law graduates who have a broad-based understanding of the real world and who have contextualized and practice-relevant legal knowledge and expertise. With SMU's unique pedagogy and holistic approach towards course assessment, SMU law graduates are also expected to be able to think across disciplines and across borders as well as be confident, articulate and analytically agile.

The SMU law curriculum was formulated by legal academics and practitioners after extensive discussions, and has been reviewed by the Board of Legal Education and the Ministry of Law.

The current 16-member law faculty in SMU is headed by Interim Dean, School of Law, Associate Professor Low Kee Yang (???). Associate Prof Low was Chair of the SMU's Law Department, which was inaugurated in July 2001 within the Lee Kong Chian School of Business.

SMU believes the proportion of law content in the curriculum strikes a fair balance in satisfying the need to provide the substantial legal content necessary for practice and SMU's objective of training holistic lawyers. The significantly higher proportion of non-law courses, as compared with what is currently offered in the existing law degree programme in Singapore, is designed to give the SMU student clarity of vision as to the context and environment within which law functions and to prepare them for the impact of globalisation of law and commerce, said Associate Professor Low.