Professor Ernest Lim

Ernest Lim is a Professor of Law and Vice Dean at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore (NUS). He received his DPhil (PhD) and BCL from the University of Oxford, LLM from Harvard Law School and LLB from NUS.

His research interests include comparative corporate law and governance as well as private law. He has published widely on the implications of these areas of law for sustainability (particularly climate change), AI, investors’ and directors’ fiduciary duties, state-owned enterprises, social enterprises, and corporate attribution.

He is the sole author of three monographs with Cambridge University Press: A Case for Shareholders’ Fiduciary Duties in Common Law Asia (2019), which won the Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Runner-Up Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship; Sustainability and Corporate Mechanisms in Asia (2020), and Social Enterprises in Asia: A New Legal Form (2023).

He is co-editor (with Phillip Morgan) of The Cambridge Handbook of Private Law and Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

He is also co-editor  (with Douglas Kysar) of The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Private Law (under contract with Oxford University Press).

His full-length articles have been published in leading peer reviewed journals such as the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Cambridge Law Journal, the American Journal of Comparative Law, and the Law Quarterly Review. His work has been cited by the Singapore Court of Appeal and before the UK Supreme Court.

In recognition of his research, he has been elected to the Robert S Campbell Visiting Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford and has been invited to deliver distinguished and keynote lectures at University College London, University of Hong Kong and University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Given his interests in governance and strategy, particularly in how law and technology can be used to promote environmental and social good, he serves as a non-executive director of a UK-based international  environmental law charity, Commonwealth Climate and Law Initiative.

Prior to joining academia, he practised corporate and securities law in the New York and Hong Kong offices of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP where he represented startups, Fortune 500 companies and investment banks in global capital market transactions.