Simon Chesterman

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. 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.

He is also the author of We, the Robots? Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

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. 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.

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.

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". He later drew parallels between Kosovo and the arguments raised by Russia for its 2014 annexation of Crimea.

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).

In 2013, Chesterman was appointed as a member of Singapore's Data Protection Advisory Committee, and in 2016 joined the United Nations University Council. From 2012 to 2017 he served as Secretary-General of the Asian Society of International Law.

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, which was intended to offer a "common language" for global legal education.

Under Chesterman's leadership, NUS Law rose from 22nd in the QS World Rankings in 2013 to 10th in 2021, in the process overtaking Hong Kong University's Faculty of Law to become the top-ranked law school in Asia.

A former Rhodes Scholar, Chesterman succeeded Tan Cheng Han as dean of NUS Law on 1 January 2012. Prior to January 2012, he was Global Professor and Director of the New York University School of Law Singapore programme. 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. Chesterman is the author or editor of twenty books and four novels.

Chesterman is a founding editor of the Asian Journal of International Law, published from 2011 by Cambridge University Press. He is on the editorial boards of other journals including Global Governance, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Security Dialogue, and The Hague Journal on the Rule of Law.

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. 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."

Chesterman's book You, The People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building (Oxford University Press, 2004), 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". 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." 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."

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 Oxford University under the supervision of the late Sir Ian Brownlie. He also holds a diploma in Chinese language from the Beijing International Studies University. 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.

His doctoral thesis as a Rhodes Scholar, became one of his first books, Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law. Before publication as a book, the work had originally won a 2000 Dasturzada Dr Jal Pavry Memorial Prize for "best thesis in international relations". 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".