The Singapore Law Gazette

Legal Education in Singapore: Past, Present, and Future

Introduction

As the profession changes, so too must legal education. The purpose of legal education is, after all, to equip lawyers with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in their work. As the 200th Anniversary of the Second Charter of Justice approaches, it is opportune to reflect on the state of legal education in Singapore today, and on what tomorrow holds for it.

The Past

The Singapore legal system is 200 years old; legal education here is less than half that age. A Law Department was established only in July 1956¹Change and Continuity: 40 Years of the Law Faculty (Times Editions Singapore; Kevin Tan, editor), p11. The Department only became a Faculty in 1959: ibid, p17. as part of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Malaya in Singapore. The first batch of students graduated in 1961.²Ibid, pp19-20.

Prof. Woon graduated 20 years later, in 1981. Teaching in the Law Faculty was done in the time-honoured way. Students were inundated with masses of cases,³Selfish students would often tear pages out of law reports. Photostating was expensive; far easier for the dishonest to simply steal the case. No doubt the culprits went on to become pillars of the Bar. in reading lists that grew longer with the years. Singapore law was considered a minor offshoot of the great banyan tree of the common law.⁴See e.g. “The Applicability of English Law in Singapore” Chapter 4 in The Singapore Legal System (Longman Singapore 1989; Walter Woon, editor), p136 where there is a table setting out the frequency of English and local authorities cited in the Malayan Law Journal between 1974-1985. The article was written by Prof. Woon who combed through ten years of law reports in the Law Library. There were practically no textbooks dealing with Singapore law. Practically the only texts that were available were casebooks – collections of cases, with scant commentary.

Over time, the law school at the National University of Singapore (“NUS”) was joined by two others: at Singapore Management University (“SMU”) and later at Singapore University of Social Sciences (“SUSS”). The SMU Yong Pung How School of Law was established in 2007 and, like NUS, takes in both undergraduate and graduate students.⁵https://law.smu.edu.sg/about/about-smu-yphsl. The SUSS School of Law was established in 2017, and has a different focus, admitting mostly mid-career, mature students. Its objective is to ensure a supply of practitioners in community law, principally in the family and criminal bars.⁶https://www.suss.edu.sg/about-suss/our-milestones.

The Present

Things changed fundamentally in the last years of the previous millennium with the advent of computers and the internet. Instead of the mind-numbing drudge of plowing through masses of dusty law reports in the hope of finding one or two relevant cases, computers allowed searches to be done at the speed of light. The unfortunate side effect was that the dearth of material was replaced by a tsunami of cases,⁷Aprés l’ordinateur le déluge, so to speak. mostly irrelevant.

The internet also liberated law teaching from the constraints of space and geography. Zoom and other similar tools enable teachers and students to interact despite the lack of proximity. This was graphically proven during the Covid Pandemic, when in-person classes ceased. Even after the Pandemic, such classes remain part of some courses.

Unfortunately, post-Pandemic, the study of law in Singapore has reverted largely to the traditional model. Most classes have gone back to requiring physical attendance. Students still read textbooks and cases, and attend lectures and tutorials. Though there are some clinical courses and workshops, for example, the Legal Clerkship Programme at SUSS in which students are attached to law firms to obtain practical experience, the study of law remains largely a traditional academic endeavour.

This is also reflected in the profile of law students. By and large, law students tend to come from high-performing junior colleges and to be academically accomplished. However, in recent years, students from Temasek Polytechnic’s Law and Management programme⁸https://www.tp.edu.sg/schools-and-courses/students/schools/bus/law-management.html have been making an appearance in law schools and acquitting themselves well. The establishment of Juris Doctor programmes at NUS and SMU, and SUSS’s focus on mature students, have also resulted in more mid-career entrants to the legal profession.

The importance of digital technology has also led to the hybridization of legal education. SMU now offers a Bachelor of Science (Computing & Law),⁹https://computing.smu.edu.sg/bsc-computing-law and Ngee Ann Polytechnic has recently started offering a Diploma in Computing with Law.¹⁰https://www.np.edu.sg/schools-courses/academic-schools/school-of-infocomm-technology/diploma-in-computing-with-law Graduates of such programmes, however, do not qualify for the bar, unless they subsequently complete an LLB or JD.

The Future

The developments of recent decades necessitate a fundamental change in the approach to teaching law in the 21st century.

Decentralise legal education

Firstly, classes no longer need to be confined to a particular place. Zoom and other similar technologies allow lecturers and students to be physically separated. Indeed in 2024, Prof. Woon was stranded in Taipei when his flight was cancelled due to a typhoon. His students switched seamlessly to a Zoom class. The fact that Prof. Woon was over a thousand miles away made no difference.

It is a canard that students prefer in-person classes to remote ones. It all depends on whether the instructor knows how to use the online tools effectively. Since the Pandemic in 2020, Prof. Woon has been polling his students about Zoom versus in-person classes.¹¹The students were from both NUS and SMU. The sample size varied from semester to semester, so responses to the questions were based on different sample sizes, from 121 to 348. In order to avoid over-burdening this short article, we have condensed the responses into positive and negative.¹²There were actually four responses, two positive and two negative. It was a deliberate strategy not to allow fence-sitters.

1. Is it important to learn how to use Zoom and similar online tools? Positive: 96.69%; negative: 3.31%.
2. Are Zoom classes more convenient than in-person classes? Positive: 92.06%; negative 7.94%
3. Is it easier on Zoom to see materials displayed on the screen? Positive: 83.33%; negative 16.67%
4. Is it easier to hear what your classmates are saying on Zoom than in-person? Positive: 62.87%; negative: 37.13%
5. Are you more inhibited about participating via Zoom than in-person? Positive: 61.94% (meaning less inhibited); negative: 38.05%
6. Is it easier to hear the instructor on Zoom than in-person? Positive: 61.06%; negative: 38.93%
7. Is it easier to ask questions on Zoom? Positive: 59.55%; negative: 40.45%

Legal practice is increasingly moving online. Cases are heard via Zoom. Client instructions are taken remotely. Any student who cannot handle online tools is at a disadvantage in the market, a fact clearly appreciated by students as shown by the first question.

It should be noted that even the most negative response was still only around 40%. To ameliorate the problems highlighted by questions 5-7, Prof. Woon gave his students his Telegram handle and invited questions. A fair number took the opportunity; on one occasion he fielded questions the night before the exam.

Remote learning also opens up legal education to more diverse classes of learners. At SUSS, many mature students have jobs and families, which makes it difficult to attend classes in person. Virtual classes enable such students to attend from home or from the office. Failure to offer an online alternative often simply results in students not attending classes at all.

Remote learning allows Law Faculties to be organised differently. It is possible now to have Indonesian and Chinese lecturers teach Indonesian and Chinese law from their respective countries. Staff may emigrate to other places and still continue to teach. The possibilities are endless.

This is not to say that law schools should be exclusively virtual. There is value in face to face interaction, to build connections which will be important when students enter the profession. This can be accomplished by certain events, group projects, or meetings. The point is simply that there ought not to be a slavish adherence to physical proximity in all things.

Assess the right things

The second mindset change needed is the way law is assessed. No one in his right mind locks himself away for three hours and tries to expound the law from memory; this a recipe for a negligence suit. Closed-book exams are therefore of limited utility. Examiners who rely on essay questions will find that the internet is awash with materials, which now are more easily accessed with AI. Multiple-choice questions lack nuance and often penalise those who can think beyond the obvious; AI will be able to provide the answers.

Artificial intelligence cannot make up for human stupidity. It is necessary to set questions that test human intelligence and moral intuition, which AI currently cannot replicate. For instance, the first scenario Prof. Woon poses to students involves a mother killing her autistic child and then attempting suicide because she cannot cope. AI may recognise that murder has been committed. What AI cannot adequately do is recommend whether the mother should be charged with murder, and if so, whether the death penalty should be sought. There are an unlimited number of scenarios which can be constructed to test students; one does not have to be a novelist to create such problems.

Advancements in AI have also had a profound impact on assessments. An additional advantage of setting hypotheticals, as described above, is that they are harder for AI to address even at a legal level. AI is currently capable of producing quite passable essays, regurgitating material from the internet, but often struggles to properly analyse and apply the law to facts, especially to novel fact patterns. The fact of the matter is that it is impossible to stop students from using AI, except in controlled conditions. Therefore, we should assume that students will use AI on any assignment that does not take place in a controlled environment. This in itself is not a bad thing: law schools should be equipping students to deal with AI tools in an ethical and effective manner. The courts do not require lawyers to refrain from using AI in their legal work, merely that it should be used responsibly, and law schools should hold students to the same standard.¹³See Registrar’s Circular 1 of 2024: “Guide on Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools by Court Users”.

What is required is that examiners be clear about what they are assessing. To ensure that students are not entirely reliant on AI, every grade should also include a component based on assessment within a controlled environment, such as an in-class exam, presentation, or viva voce, in which students will be required to stand on their own without the assistance of AI. This will likely be more labour-intensive for the faculty, but this is a resourcing issue that can be worked out.

Teach the right skills

The third change is in what needs to be taught. Content is not as important as skills. Content changes with the current rate of change, it is likely that whatever cases and statutes students learn will have become updated or outdated by the time they enter practice. Further, the ability to ingest and regurgitate information has diminished greatly in value with the advent of more powerful legal research tools, particularly those powered by AI. Information recall will likely be a function of technology, and lawyers must add value elsewhere in the process.

The principal value of a legal education lies in acquiring the ability to reason. Substantive legal technology, including legal AI, is still in its infancy and subject to severe errors in reasoning and accuracy. The role of the lawyer, for the foreseeable future, will be to curate content retrieved by technology and shape it into accurate, comprehensible, and compelling legal arguments.

Further, reasoning must be from first principles. Mere adherence to precedent lacks value in a world where a precedent saying whatever one wants can be found if one looks hard enough – a task that has now been made possible by modern legal databases. The Common Law evolved in circumstances of information scarcity, but the modern world suffers from information overload.

In Singapore today, in addition to cases reported in the Singapore Law Reports, there are unreported Supreme Court cases uploaded to the Judiciary.gov.sg website, and even State Courts decisions on LawNet. This is in addition to domain-specific data repositories, such as the Sentencing Information Repository on LawNet. The existence of this vast corpus of cases imposes an obligation on lawyers to search all of it, just in case something of relevance crops up. Given that the vast majority of such cases are not legally significant, this exercise is often both time-consuming and fruitless. Further, cases are easy to hallucinate by AI, and the courts are already seeing cases where such hallucinations have been cited.¹⁴See Tan Hai Peng Micheal and another (as the executors of the estate of Tan Thuan Teck, deceased) v Tan Cheong Joo and another and other matters (2025) SGHC 217; and Tajudin bin Gulam Rasul and another v Suriaya bte Haja Mohideen (2025) 5 SLR 518. More information is not always better, especially when such information simply increases the noise-signal ratio.

Given the increasing pace and complexity of legal work, lawyers cannot afford to be bogged down by irrelevant things. Reasoning from first principles, aided judiciously by a few, relevant precedents, is not only more intellectually rigorous but also more efficient.

Therefore, undergraduate legal education should focus on reinforcing the core skills of legal reasoning above all else. Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon has expressed concerns about AI degrading the skills of lawyers:¹⁵Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, Opening of the Legal Year 2026: https://www.judiciary.gov.sg/news-and-resources/news/news-details/chief-justice-sundaresh-menon–response-delivered-at-the-opening-of-the-legal-year-2026 a distinction must be made between core skills of legal reasoning and other ancillary skills. No one should mourn the loss of the ability to use Boolean operators in legal research, for example, whereas we ought to be rightfully concerned if lawyers are unable to reason from first principles without the assistance of AI.

This means that law schools should focus more on core legal subjects and not less. It is not really necessary, for example, to teach law students computer programming or legal technology. In practice, lawyers will not be coding, they will depend on other professionals to do that. What is more important is that lawyers understand their own business well, and are able to articulate their requirements and work seamlessly with professionals from other disciplines. If anything, rather than coding, lawyers should be taught process mapping, design thinking or systems thinking. But even then, this is something that can and should be done at a Continuing Professional Development level. LLB and JD courses are packed enough as it is, and adding more subjects necessarily means removing some other subjects. Ancillary skills should not be taught at the expense of core legal skills.

Incentivise effective legal educators

Finally, there has to be a change in the way lecturers are assessed. Citations of published works is not a good gauge of how effective a lecturer is. Foreign journals are uninterested in Singapore law. What matters is whether lawyers and judges actually read what is published.

There are better ways to assess this. Citations in decided cases is one. Some lecturers are cited hundreds of times; others hardly, if at all. Another way is to eschew publication in journals and put articles on the internet. The number of hits will show how much of a reach a particular writer has. The writer will live and die according to the persuasiveness and clarity of his arguments.

Singapore legal education cannot move forward in the 21st century if it remains mired in 20th century methods. Some dinosaurs will be stuck and go extinct. Others will evolve and take flight. Encourage the teachers of law to soar.