page_title: SMU School of Law
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: SMU School of Law / History
caption_attribution_description: English: PM Lee Hsien Loong with Ho Ching, Ho Kwon Ping, and the SMU President at the opening of the SMU School of Law
context_page_description: The Singapore Management University School of Law is one of the six schools of 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. Before becoming a law school, the school was a Law Department within the School of Business between 2000 and 2007.
  The school offers a four-year undergraduate single Bachelor of Laws degree programme and a double degree programme combining the law degree programme with one of SMU's existing non-law programmes. The school also offers a graduate Juris Doctor programme as well as a Master of Laws programme. The Dual LLM in Commercial Law, which confers LLM degrees from Queen Mary University of London and SMU, was launched in 2015.
  Admission to the law programme is competitive: in the 2015 University Admissions Exercise, both the 10th and 90th percentile had an Indicative Grade Profile of AAA/A; approximately 1,300 applicants were shortlisted for an interview and a written test.
context_section_description: The School of Law was preceded by the Law Department, which was created in 2000 and part of the university's Lee Kong Chian School of Business, and headed by Professor Andrew Phang (now Judge of Appeal, Supreme Court of Singapore). A full-fledged law school was established in 2007—fifty years after the establishment of the first and then-only law school in Singapore, National University of Singapore Faculty of Law—following a review by the government that concluded there was a shortage of qualified legal personnel in Singapore.
  The school's first dean was Professor Michael Furmston, a leading authority on contracts and commercial law in the Commonwealth. He headed the school from its inception in 2007 to 2012. Professor Yeo Tiong Min SC was then the dean from 2012 to 2017. Professor Goh Yihan has been the dean since 2017.
  On 18 March 2009, the Doctor of Jurisprudence (JD) programme was launched. In May 2010, the Continuing Legal Education programme (since re-branded as SMU Law Academy) was launched.
  In March 2013, the school became the first Asian law school to join the THEMIS network and in November that year a partnership was set up with Yonsei University for a dual JD programme.
  The Applied Research Centre for Intellectual Assets and the Law in Asia (ARCIALA), as well as the Centre for Cross-Border Commercial Law in Asia (CEBCLA), were launched in May 2015 and in June that year the school signed a sponsorship and training agreement with WongPartnership. In August, it launched a dual LLM with Queen Mary, University of London.
  The law school building relocated in December 2016 to Armenian Street and in October 2017, a Pro Bono Centre was launched. At the same time, the Singapore Academy of Law's Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy (SIDRA) was launched, which subsequently came under the auspices of the law school in 2019.
  In June 2018, the school received a $4.5m grant from the National Research Foundation and IMDA to helm a research programme on AI and data use. In July that year it launched the LLM in Judicial Studies and in September the Centre for AI and Data Governance (CAIDG). In March 2020, the Centre for Computational Law was established after receiving a $15m grant from the NRF.
  There is an Advisory Board which provides advisory assistance to the School of Law; it routinely includes Supreme Court judges, senior litigators, corporate lawyers, managing partners of law firms, and partners of foreign law firms. The Advisory Board is currently chaired by former Judge of Appeal and Attorney-General VK Rajah SC. Rajah, together with former Supreme Court judges Yong Pung How and Chao Hick Tin, serve as Distinguished Fellows.
caption: PM Lee Hsien Loong at the Kwa Geok Choo Law Library during the official launch of the School of Law building in 2017
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