About the School of Law

We have, we have a centre for Islamic law and finance [International Islamic Law & Finance Centre]. And that's, that is interdisciplinary, a lot of the work that's been done in this case is driven by finance and actually bankers are probably more interested in this than lawyers or there are more bankers than lawyers who are interested in this. And similarly there is certainly scope for joint work in the area of law and finance, non-Islamic, all the conventional finance. And most of the work of this kind will actually have to be done, I think, by teams of people partly from law and partly from finance, possibly from accounting. But you could, you could imagine somebody who's actually dual qualified.

Yes, well lawyers are obviously concerned with how disputes are resolved. One of the ways in which disputes are resolved is by going to court which is an obviously lawyer-like activity. But there's a whole range of other ways, some of them are quite like going to court, like arbitration, which is not done by courts but where the process is quite similar. And some of them are done, the other extreme you have negotiation and then you have mediation which is a form of helping people to negotiate. And it's coming to be recognised that you need actually, in order to solve as many disputes as possible, you need to have a range of techniques and that for many purposes, litigation is a very expensive way of doing it and therefore other forms should be tried first. And this has not only sort of domestic but also international implications. Singapore has serious ambitions to be a major regional centre for arbitration. It has developed a new arbitration centre in Maxwell Chambers. Our interest in dispute resolution law fits in with that, I think we will be  teaching students, it's quite a lot of work for students and when we have a master's [degree] it'll be more. But we're also helping with the training of people doing things of this kind, arbitrators and mediators and so on.