On January 8, a group of students from the Faculty of Law of the National University of Singapore (NUS Law) visited the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus. The motto of NUS Law is Asia’s Global Law School. It was founded in 1956 and employs 72 faculty members to teach 1200 students. NUS Law is Singapore’s oldest and largest law school. It has been ranked among the top twenty law schools in the world. NUS Law publishes the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies, Singapore’s leading scholarly publication on law and one of the oldest law journals in the Commonwealth. It also produces the Asian Journal of International Law (published by Cambridge University Press) and the Asian Journal of Comparative Law. The Singapore Law Review, Asia’s oldest student-run legal publication, is managed exclusively by the students of NUS Law.

The current dean of NUS Law is Professor Simon Chesterman, who is also Secretary-General of the Asian Society of International Law and editor of the Asian Journal of International Law. Professor Chesterman’s research concerns include international law, public authority, and data protection. He has written and edited a number of books, and the Thammasat University Library owns some of them, including One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Secretary or General? The UN Secretary-General in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and You, The People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Professor Chesterman serves on  Singapore’s Data Protection Advisory Committee and the United Nations University Council. On the school website, Dean Chesterman writes,

[…] NUS Law offers a rigorous legal training, but we also teach personal and professional skills that enable our graduates to operate across boundaries. This includes national boundaries, through the chance to spend a semester or more of your third year at partner law schools in over fifteen countries, or your fourth year earning a Master of Laws degree from NYU or Boston University. We also cross imaginary boundaries, as you may take subjects outside law from across the University – in some cases earning you a second degree – and participate in activities that broaden you as a person, such as the many opportunities for public service. At NUS Law, you will be part of the conversation. Our professors expect you to challenge them, to share new ideas, and debate different perspectives. In my own classes, the good students can answer my questions; the best students can predict those questions. But the truly great students pose questions I had never imagined. We don’t aim, then, to produce “lawyers”. We aim to produce leaders who can be successful in whatever path they choose.

NUS Law Library

The C J Koh Law Library is one of 8 NUS Libraries. It was named in memory of Mr Koh Choon Joo, who made a generous donation towards upgrading of the library collection. Mr Koh Choon Joo, known as Mr C J Koh, was a lawyer and philanthropist. Born in Indonesia to a merchant family from the Dutch East Indies, he was educated in the United Kingdom. He later practiced law in Singapore. As the C J Koh Law Library website explains,

Mr Koh is remembered as a quiet and reserved individual. He enjoyed writing poetry and fiction. He read the works of great philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle, and even kept a scrap book with his thoughts on these philosophical works and his own observations on life. Mr Koh was an enthusiastic artist and avid art collector. In his retirement years, he completed some 400 oil paintings, several of which are now displayed in the C J Koh Art Gallery in the Law Library.

Many of his artworks refer to great painters and writers of the past. He painted a portrait in oil on plywood of Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish philosopher and historian of the Victorian era. The TU library owns a number of books by Carlyle. Mr. Koh included in his painting the message Born in Ecclefechan, referring to the small village in the south of Scotland in Dumfries and Galloway which is mainly known for having been the birthplace of Carlyle. Perhaps a reference was meant that even people born in humble and out of the way places may achieve much in life, with talent and determination.

In another painting alluding to a great writer from the UK, the oil on plywood Dr. Johnson, aged 31 (1740) shows Samuel Johnson, an essayist, biographer, and writer of dictionaries who lived in the 1700s. Usually thought of as an old and distinguished man, Dr. Johnson is portrayed in his younger years by Mr. Koh.

Among his reflections on the artistic traditions of the West, Mr. Koh also created his own copy of The Blue Boy, a full-length portrait in oil from the 1700s by the British artist Thomas Gainsborough, now in the Henry E. Huntington Art Gallery in San Marino, California, USA. The TU Library also owns books about the art of Gainsborough. This painting has long been appreciated as a study of elaborate costume as well as a portrait of an unidentified young man.

Mr. Koh also made the effort at least twice to produce his own version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. One of the most famous paintings in the world, in the collection of the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, the Mona Lisa has been analyzed and explained in many books, including one in the collection of the TU Library.

In another interpretation of a famous work, Mr. Koh also painted his own version of The Angelus (L’Angélus), an oil painting by the French artist Jean-François Millet, who lived in the 1800s. The Angelus is the name of a prayer in the Catholic religion. In it, the Angel of the Lord is described as speaking to Mary, the mother of Jesus. In the painting, two farmers pause in their work in a field to bow their heads and say the prayer. Agriculture in Singapore was once much more extensive than it is today, with modern urban development. This look at religion in the French countryside of the 1800s may be a comparison with the artist’s own experience of spiritual life in modern Asia.

Clearly learning about, and offering his own interpretations of, Western art and culture, Mr. Koh was developing his own conception of how to be sensitive to art in Singapore. One painting that outlines this effort at defining himself shows a young Chinese man with rounded eyes. Next to him, the question is written in French language, Am I Chinese? (Suis-je Chinois?) This inquiry about identity may have occurred to Mr. Koh during his extended stay in Europe at the time of his studies.

Student activities

In addition to their academic activities, NUS Law students are involved in projects such as the Christmas Charity. Poor children who live in orphanages and other public institutions are treated to a day of games planned by the students. The children are invited to a seasonal concert, accompanied by students, and given presents. NUS Law students also produce an annual musical theatre production, Law IV, performed by each year’s graduating class. Profits from ticket sales are sent to charities chosen by the graduating class.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)