Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Connor Graham, Asia Research Institute, and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Inter-Asian legal connections are undergoing a radical reconfiguration. Transnational corporate lawyers, and the global law firms for which they work, are undertaking new modes of documenting and disputing legal relationships. As a consequence, commercial relationships across the region have undergone dramatic changes over the last three decades. Essentially, the map of Inter-Asian Legalities is being quietly redrawn. Within this new legal ecology transnational corporate lawyers act as intermediaries. They facilitate commercial relationships between businesses and other actors, such as governments, across Asia and beyond.

Three global cities – Dubai, Jakarta and Singapore – are important nodes of commercial and legal connection. Transnational corporate lawyers act the administrators of globalization as they mediate between intricate business and government relationships across Asia and their activities provide the glue for commercial networks that connect Asia to the rest of the world. By theorizing Inter-Asian Legalities, I seek to interrogate the ways that Asian cultures, histories and politics are impacting upon definitions of ‘law’ and are arguably reshaping what it means to be a contemporary ‘lawyer’.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jeremy Kingsley is a legal scholar and anthropologist. He is a Senior Lecturer (tenure-track) at Swinburne Law School, Melbourne, Australia and holds the prestigious Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Transregional Research Fellowship (http://www.ssrc.org/fellowships/view/transregional-research–fellowship/).

Dr Kingsley received his LLM and PhD degrees in Law at the University of Melbourne and his BA and LLB from Deakin University. He has been a Postdoctoral Research Fellows at the Asia Research Institute and then a Senior Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute, both at the National University of Singapore (NUS). While at NUS, he lectured at Tembusu Residential College and within the Comparative Asian Studies PhD Program.

His research has focused upon religious and political authority in Indonesia and how this affects local governance. Dr Kingsley is currently undertaking a research project titled: “Inter-Asian Legalities”, which examines transnational corporate lawyers in Jakarta, Dubai and Singapore. He has undertaken extensive field research primarily on the eastern Indonesian island of Lombok, as well as in Jakarta, Morocco and Dubai. His work has been published in academic and public affairs journals.

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