BUSINESS LAW: COMMON LAW PERSPECTIVES
PROGRAMME OBJECTIVES
High-value, high-profile and high drama disputes that arise from doing business often dominate the news cycle and seize the public imagination. What are the laws that ultimately decide those disputes? This course teaches some of the key doctrines of common law that govern those disputes.
We use 'real-world' case studies as the platform for grounding the discussions in our lectures and tutorials, based on popular models such as the Harvard Business School case method, the hypothetical problem-method used in leading law schools, as well as popular texts which present legal material through case studies, such as Contracts in the Real World: Stories of Popular Contracts and Why They Matter (CUP 2016) and Company Law in Context (2012).
PROGRAMME HIGHLIGHTS

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Welcome message from Dean of NUS SCALE |
Tutorials conducted over Zoom |
PRE-REQUISITES
Participants should be able to read, write and communicate fluently in English, and understand basic terminologies used in the class.
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
Anyone with little or no knowledge of common law and wants to learn common law doctrine and reasoning relating to disputes that commonly arise from doing business.
MODE OF DELIVERY
19 hours of synchronous lessons, tutorials and a final project presentation
MODE OF ASSESSMENT
- Participants are split into groups of 6 and will give a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation in response to case study questions similar to those covered in the tutorials.
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Tan Zhong Xing
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law
National University of Singapore
A graduate of Harvard Law School and the NUS Law Faculty, Zhong Xing first joined the faculty as a member of the inaugural batch of Sheridan Fellows, subsequently being appointed Assistant Professor in 2018. Zhong Xing’s research and teaching interests are in contract law, private law and legal theory, and commercial and corporate law more generally, as well as the various intersection points between these fields. He has written more recently on the role of distributive justice in contract law, the rise of the ‘relational contract’ concept, the interface between private and public norms in contracting, as well as evolving doctrinal areas including the concept of good faith and the law of contractual interpretation.
His work has been published (or is forthcoming) in a number of leading general and specialist law journals, including the Modern Law Review, Legal Studies, the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, and has been cited by the Singapore Court of Appeal. Over the last few years Zhong Xing has been the recipient of various awards, including the Hart Publishing Prize for the best paper by an early career scholar at the Ninth Biennial Conference on the Law of Obligations (2018), and previously, Harvard Law School’s Project on the Foundations of Private Law Prize, as well as the Montrose Memorial Prize for Jurisprudence and the Wong Peng Koon Prize for Best Directed Research Paper at NUS Law.
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Justin Tan
Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law
National University of Singapore
Justin holds an LLB (NUS, 1st Class Honors), BBA (NUS) and an LLM in tax (NYU, where he was a Vanderbilt scholar). He practised tax law at Baker & McKenzie.Wong & Leow, advising on the international tax aspects of cross-border transactions.
Justin has published in tax-related journals, including International Tax Review and IBFD’s Asia-Pacific Tax Bulletin. He has also published on torts in Torts Law Journal and Singapore Journal of Legal Studies
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CERTIFICATE OF COMPLETION
Successful participants who complete all requirements of the programme including passing the assessment will receive a certificate of completion issued by NUS SCALE.
A sample of the certificate of completion can be found here:

Participants from the project team with the highest score for the group project will also receive a commendation letter. A sample is shown below:

UPCOMING SESSIONS
Group Sign-up:
14 January to 12 February 2023
in collaboration with Looker Education Group
For programme enquiries, please fill the form here.