Seminar presented by Associate Professor Kwan Ho Lau (Singapore Management University) and hosted by the UNSW CIBEL Centre.
You are invited to attend an in-person seminar hosted by the UNSW CIBEL Centre, featuring visiting Associate Professor Kwan Ho Lau, Singapore Management University (SMU), titled Uncertainty in the Derogation of Terms Implied by Law. Light refreshments will be served.
In 2001, Professor (now Justice) Elisabeth Peden concluded after some study that the process of implication of terms in law was “correspondingly vague and lacking in definite principles”. Over two decades later, that characterisation remains accurate. The varied terminology in judicial use reflects an ambiguity over the normative position occupied by terms implied by law. That, in turn, has given rise to doctrinal and practical uncertainty in relation to the (non-)derogation of such terms and the standard against which any derogation should be scrutinised. This seminar aims to spur reflection on how implication in law interacts with matters of intention, centrality, and derogability.
About the speaker:
Kwan Ho Lau is an Associate Professor of Law at the Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University (SMU). He teaches and researches primarily in the law of contracts. His other research interests include the legal process and the development of the legal profession. His work is cited by courts in Singapore and Hong Kong, by sitting Commonwealth judges in extra-judicial speeches, by regulatory bodies, and in academic treatises and articles regularly. He has given expert evidence on Singapore law in foreign court proceedings. Between 2021 and 2024, Kwan Ho was the Deputy Director of the Centre for Commercial Law in Asia. Prior to joining SMU, he practised law in the M&A department of a leading Singapore law firm, was in-house counsel at a sovereign wealth fund, and served in the Supreme Court of Singapore as a Justices’ Law Clerk.