Science and Technology Law Commons^™

Patent Regime Shift And Firm Innovation Strategy: Evidence From The Second Amendment To China's Patent Law, Tony W. Tong, Wenlong He, Liang Chen, Zi-Lin He, Jiangyong Lu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Research Summary: While changes in intellectual property rights (IPR) protection significantly shape firm innovation, the mechanisms driving firms' responses remain poorly understood. Leveraging the Second Amendment to China's Patent Law, which strengthens appropriability particularly for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), as a natural experiment, we show that stronger IPR has mixed effects on SOEs' innovation. While SOEs increase the rate of innovation subsequent to the Amendment, they shift the direction of innovation toward more familiar areas in which they face a lesser need to adjust existing routines. This directional change suggests a quality decline in SOEs' innovation that may be attributed to …

Operational Agency: A Permeable Legal Fiction For Tracing Culpability In Ai Systems, Anirban Mukherjee, Hannah H. Chang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems act with a high degree of independence yet lack legal personhood—a paradox that fractures doctrines grounded in human-centric notions of mens rea and actus reus. This Article introduces Operational Agency (OA)—a permeable legal fiction structured as an ex post evidentiary framework—and Operational Agency Graph (OAG)—a tool for mapping causal interactions among human actors, organizations, and AI systems. OA evaluates an AI’s observable operational characteristics: its goal-directedness (as a proxy for intent), predictive processing (as a proxy for foresight), and safety architecture (as a proxy for standard of care). OAG operationalizes that analysis by embedding these …

Online Safety (Relief And Accountability) Bill: Further Experiments In Balancing Rights And Responsibilities, Siyuan Chen, Zavier Yu Wu, Jie Ting Lee

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Singapore’s latest legislation to address online harms, the Online Safety (Relief and Accountability) Bill, was passed in Parliament in November 2025. The legislation, which takes a complainant-centric approach, provides the Commissioner of Online Safety a broad range of powers so that timely redress can be given for reports of online harms such as image abuse, sexual harassment, doxxing, and stalking. Various torts that impose duties on administrators and platforms have also been created. Legislation of this nature invariably raises issues about whether an appropriate balance between freedom and responsibility has been struck. This Legislative Comment analyses some of the more …

The Case For Ai Authorship In Copyright Law, Cheng Lim Saw, Duncan Lim

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Today, with generative AI, literary and artistic works can be created almost effortlessly. There is at present intense debate as to whether works generated by AI – broadly categorised as “AI-assisted” and “AI-generated” works – ought to attract copyright protection. AI-assisted works are those that involve some degree of human intervention. Where AI-generated works are concerned, however, such works are created autonomously by the AI itself with minimal (de minimis) input from an identifiable human being. Presently, it is generally accepted that AI-generated works do not attract copyright protection for want of a human author. This article examines whether it …

Copyright Ownership And Duration Of Ai-Authored Works, Cheng Lim Saw

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

On the assumption that Parliament has endorsed the notion of AI authorship and the prospect that copyright may well subsist in works created autonomously by the AI itself, this essay further explores allied issues surrounding the ownership and duration of copyright in AI-authored works.

Law Grapples With Its Achilles’ Heel? Uncertainties, Digital Experiments, And The Ai Frontier, Heng Wang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The governance of digitalization— which encompasses developments such as artificial intelligence (AI) and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) — confronts serious challenges. At the core of the challenges are uncertainties, which form the central obstacle to effective governance. These uncertainties range from cyber risks to shifting societal responses. Law, as an institutionalized framework of governance, faces mounting pressure and wrestles with a fundamental vulnerability: traditional legal frameworks struggle to address uncertainties in digitalization.

To tackle the pervasive challenges of uncertainties, this article addresses two connected questions: What uncertainties does law face in governing digitalization shaped by emerging technologies? How can …

Bridging The Great Wall: China’S Evolving Cross-Border Data Flow Policies And Implications For Global Data Governance, Sheng Zhang, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Despite the rapid expansion of the digital economy, the global regulatory framework for data flows remains fragmented, with countries adopting divergent approaches shaped by their own regulatory priorities. As a key player in the Internet economy, China’s approach to cross-border data flows (CBDF) not only defines its domestic digital landscape but also influences emerging global norms. This paper takes a comprehensive view of the evolution of China’s CBDF regime, examining its development through both domestic and international lenses. Domestically, China’s regulation of CBDF has evolved from a security-first approach to one that seeks to balance security with economic development. This …

The Regulatory Challenges Raised By The Evolution From Open Banking To Banking-As-A-Service, Nydia Remolina Leon

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In May 2024, a company in California suddenly made headlines across the financial press. Synapse Financial Technologies, once hailed as a pioneer in the next wave of financial innovation, filed for bankruptcy. The company had promised to revolutionize banking by providing “Banking-as-a-Service” (BaaS): an invisible layer of technology that allowed apps to plug directly into the financial system.

Negotiating With Gpt-4: Digital Doormat Or Skilful Counterpart?, Dorcas Quek Anderson

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have been creatively harnessed in the conflict resolution arena as dialogue agents interacting with humans within negotiations, due to their capacity for in-context learning and giving human-like responses. In light of the burgeoning use of LLMs in conflict resolution training, a pilot study was conducted to ascertain the desirability of using dialogue agents built on GPT-4 in conducting simulations for students learning negotiation skills. This article discusses insights gained from the study on the reliability of LLM agents in following prompts for negotiation simulations; notable negotiation behaviour of the LLM agent; the degree …

Global Data Flows X ‘Digital Trade Law’: Instruments, Institutions, And Infrastructures, Craig Atkinson

Centre for Digital Law

With a vision to become the ‘premier law and technology research centre in Asia’ and combine law, computer science, and digital humanities scholarship, the digital economy is one of four clusters of focus under the recently established Singapore Management University (SMU) Centre for Digital Law (CDL) at the Yong Pung How School of Law (YPHSL).

To investigate digital economy-related issue areas in collaboration with the University of Lucerne’s Trade Law 4.0 project, the forthcoming white paper ‘Data Free Flow with Trust (DFFT): Cross-Border Cooperation and Digital Trade on the Edge’ opens with a provocative statement: Globally, ‘economic governance’ is becoming …

Governing Intelligence: Singapore’S Evolving Ai Governance Framework, Jason G. Allen, Jane Loo, Jose Luna

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This paper provides an outline analysis of the evolving governance framework for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Singapore. Across the Singapore government, AI solutions are being adopted in line with Singapore’s “Smart Nation Initiative” to leverage technology to make impactful changes to the nation and the economy. In tandem, Singaporean authorities have been assiduous to release a growing number of governance documents, which we analyse together to chart the city-state’s approach to AI governance in international comparison. Characteristics of Singapore’s AI governance approach include an emphasis on consensusbuilding between stakeholders (particularly government and industry but also citizens) andvoluntary or “quasi” regulation, …

Trust And Robotics: A Multi-Staged Decision-Making Approach To Robots In Community, Wenxi Zhang, Willow Wong, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

With the desired outcome of social good within the wider robotics ecosystem, trust is identified as the central adhesive of the human–robot interaction (HRI) interface. However, building trust between humans and robots involves more than improving the machine’s technical reliability or trustworthiness in function. This paper presents a holistic, community-based approach to trust-building, where trust is understood as a multifaceted and multi-staged looped relation that depends heavily on context and human perceptions. Building on past literature that identifies dispositional and learned stages of trust, our proposed decision to trust model considers more extensively the human and situational factors influencing how …

Legal Governance Of Artificial Intelligence In Healthcare Devices And Services In Singapore, Warren B. Chik, Haran Sugumaran

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare applies across a spectrum of goods and services that support the industry. The main benefits of developing and applying AI to healthcare are: (a) the potential for it to perform functions beyond what can be done manually by the natural person; (b) the greater efficiency and accuracy that it can give to detection, diagnosis and medication/recovery; (c) the minimisation of risk and the possible lowering of cost (in the long term); and (d) in appropriate cases, minimal human intervention or involvement, especially in situations or conditions that may present a risk of …

Generative Artificial Intelligence: The Protection Of Personal Data And Countering False Narratives About The Person, Warren B. Chik

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Generative artificial intelligence (“Gen AI”) has rapidly become ubiquitous on online platform services, from chatbots and virtual assistants to search engines and social media. This generated concerns over potentially harmful effects from its use in both social and professional settings, including the added threats to personal data privacy and accuracy of personal information. In this article, the author will explain how Gen AI operates and why it gives rise to these issues, examine the policy and law relating to Gen AI, both existent and anticipated, and suggest possible solutions to the problems in the form of legal and non-legal measures.

Legal Hypergraphs, Corinna Coupette, Dirk Hartung, Daniel Martin Katz

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Complexity science provides a powerful framework for understanding physical, biological and social systems, and network analysis is one of its principal tools. Since many complex systems exhibit multilateral interactions that change over time, in recent years, network scientists have become increasingly interested in modelling and measuring dynamic networks featuring higher-order relations. At the same time, while network analysis has been more widely adopted to investigate the structure and evolution of law as a complex system, the utility of dynamic higher-order networks in the legal domain has remained largely unexplored. Setting out to change this, we introduce temporal hypergraphs as a …

Generative Ai In Finance: Risks And Potential Solutions, Nydia Remolina Leon

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Generative Artificial Intelligence captured the attention of academics, policymakers, the private sector, and some regulators in 2022 after the launch of ChatGPT and its widespread adoption worldwide. Then, during the World Economic Forum session in 2023, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said that the ‘golden age’ of AI is underway and generative AI is set to play a big role in it. Accordingly, Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into OpenAI, the company behind the launch of ChatGPT. Additionally, Google and Meta have also created their own generative AI models. Given the multiplicity of potential use cases …

Public Offices In Processes Of Constitutional Development, J.G. Allen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

What factors drive constitutional change and sustain positive transformation? How are democratic values recognised, restored, and preserved through constitutional change? How can these questions be answered in a manner that is relevant to most of the world? This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars and practitioners to explore the relationship between democratic consolidation and constitutional endurance through consideration of recent experiences in seven African and Asian states that have undergone an understudied democratising event in the past decade: Ethiopia, The Gambia, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Building on the empirical surveys, seven thematic chapters offer analytical insights …

Duties For Datasets, Jerrold Tsin Howe Soh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Machine learning (ML) systems are increasingly being deployed in contexts, such as law, medicine and finance, where system errors present serious and foreseeable risks. As ML system behaviour is largely determined by their training inputs, should dataset providers owe duties of care to victims? Using the ImageNet dataset and the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models as case studies, this chapter argues that the conventional approach of centralising duties on system providers alone yields insufficient safeguards. Dataset-specific duties should also be considered to incentivise precaution in the preparation of crucial ML input. The chapter analyses how dataset duties may be encompassed …

The Impact Of Generative Ai In The Financial Sector [El Impacto De La Inteligencia Artificial Generativa En El Sector Financiero], Nydia Remolina Leon

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

Governance With And Of Ai: The Role Of Ethics, Equity, And Trustworthiness, Nydia Remolina Leon, Cigdem Gurgur, Mustafa Ozbilgin, Jeannie Paterson

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This blog from the Area 4 Committee (Focus on Ethics, Equity & Trustworthiness) working across the Data for Policy Conference and Data & Policy journal discusses the lines of inquiry related to the question of how AI and data systems can improve governance and invites contributions by the 27th November deadline of the 2024 Conference.

Sharing And Caring: Creating A Culture Of Constructive Criticism In Computational Legal Studies, Corinna Coupette, Dirk Hartung

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

We introduce seven foundational principles for creating a culture of constructive criticism in computational legal studies. Beginning by challenging the current perception of papers as the primary scholarly output, we call for a more comprehensive interpretation of publications. We then suggest to make these publications computationally reproducible, releasing all of the data and all of the code all of the time, on time, and in the most functioning form feasible. Once all materials are made available by default, we invite constructive criticism in all phases of the publication life cycle. We posit that our proposals will help form our field, …

Data Is The New Gold: A Singapore Perspective On The Duty Of Care Concerning A Dataset’S Role In Contributing To Bias And Ai Hallucinations, Daniel Seah

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Amidst the trends and advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, the dataset’s key role in creating AI harms is a constant. Yet the literature’s attention is typically focussed on the machinelearning’s role, from which the dataset’s role is examined usually in terms of its potential for bias. Datasets also contribute to AI hallucinations. Again, the literature focuses on the composite roles of datasets and AI models in hallucinations, in isolation from a dataset’s contributory role in creating bias. Therefore, the overlapping and distinctive roles of datasets, as a dual contributor, are understudied in the literature. Through the legal concept of …

The Quincecare Duty In Flux: The Implications For Banks And Digital Asset Platforms, Jason. Teo, Aaron Yoong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

With the increased sophistication of online payment methods, it is unsurprising that incidents of fraud have become commonplace, with fraudsters often employing innovative means against unsuspecting victims. Users, regulators and industry players in the banking sector are, in many aspects, struggling to keep pace with the continually evolving legal landscape of the fraud space. Similar challenges also begin to arise in the digital asset space for the various platforms engaged (whether for trading or staking). In recent years, a significant question has resurfaced concerning the liability of entities such as banks and digital asset platforms for the losses suffered by …

Law Smells: Defining And Detecting Problematic Patterns In Legal Drafting, Corinna Coupette, Dirk Hartung, Janis Beckedorf, Maximilian Böther, Daniel Martin Katz

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Building on the computer science concept of code smells, we initiate the study of law smells, i.e., patterns in legal texts that pose threats to the comprehensibility and maintainability of the law. With five intuitive law smells as running examples—namely, duplicated phrase, long element, large reference tree, ambiguous syntax, and natural language obsession—, we develop a comprehensive law smell taxonomy. This taxonomy classifies law smells by when they can be detected, which aspects of law they relate to, and how they can be discovered. We introduce textbased and graph-based methods to identify instances of law smells, confirming their utility in …

Law Smells: Defining And Detecting Problematic Patterns In Legal Drafting, Corinna Coupette, Dirk Hartung, Janis Beckedorf, Maximilian Bother, Daniel Martin Katz

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Building on the computer science concept of code smells, we initiate the study of law smells, i.e., patterns in legal texts that pose threats to the comprehensibility and maintainability of the law. With five intuitive law smells as running examples—namely, duplicated phrase, long element, large reference tree, ambiguous syntax, and natural language obsession—, we develop a comprehensive law smell taxonomy. This taxonomy classifies law smells by when they can be detected, which aspects of law they relate to, and how they can be discovered. We introduce text-based and graph-based methods to identify instances of law smells, confirming their utility in …

Regulating Artificial Intelligence In International Investment Law, Mark Mclaughlin

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The interaction between artificial intelligence (AI) and international investment treaties is an uncharted territory of international law. Concerns over the national security, safety, and privacy implications of AI are spurring regulators into action around the world. States have imposed restrictions on data transfer, utilised automated decision-making, mandated algorithmic transparency, and limited market access. This article explores the interaction between AI regulation and standards of investment protection. It is argued that the current framework provides an unpredictable legal environment in which to adjudicate the contested norms and ethics of AI. Treaties should be recalibrated to reinforce their anti-protectionist origins, embed human-centric …

Interconnectedness And Financial Stability In The Era Of Artificial Intelligence, Nydia Remolina Leon

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This chapter explains AI use cases may amplify some threats to the stability of the financial system. It argues that lack of a consistent approach to AI Governance by financial regulators and limited oversight on some AI models in terms of systemic risks need to be addressed to preserve the stability of the financial system. To illustrate the problem and propose specific policy recommendations, the chapter first explains how the widespread use AI in finance impacts systemic risk in the financial sector. Then, it explains why trustworthiness of AI encompasses not only the typical ethical principles about transparency, explainability, fairness, …

Legal Dispositionism And Artificially-Intelligent Attributions, Jerrold Soh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

It is conventionally argued that because an artificially-intelligent (AI) system acts autonomously, its makers cannot easily be held liable should the system's actions harm. Since the system cannot be liable on its own account either, existing laws expose victims to accountability gaps and need to be reformed. Recent legal instruments have nonetheless established obligations against AI developers and providers. Drawing on attribution theory, this paper examines how these seemingly opposing positions are shaped by the ways in which AI systems are conceptualised. Specifically, folk dispositionism underpins conventional legal discourse on AI liability, personality, publications, and inventions and leads us towards …

Defeasible Semantics For L4, Guido Governatori, Meng Weng (Huang Mingrong) Wong

Centre for Computational Law (2022-2025)

The importance of defeasibility for legal reasoning has been investigated for a long time (see among other [10, 3, 11]). This notion mostly concerns the issue that textual provisions of (legal) norms typically provide prima facie conditions for their applicability, but to understand a norm in full, we have to evaluate the norms in the context in which the norm is used and to see if other norms prevent it either to apply or to be effective. In other words, when evaluating norms, we must account for possible (prima facie) conflicts and exceptions. Indeed, in general, norms first provide the …

Natural Language Processing In The Legal Domain, Daniel Martin Katz, Dirk Hartung, Lauritz Gerlach, Abhik Jana, Michael J. Ii Bommarito

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In this paper, we summarize the current state of the field of NLP and Law with a specific focus on recent technical and substantive developments. To support our analysis, we construct and analyze a corpus of more than six hundred NLP and Law related papers published over the past decade. Our analysis highlights several major trends. Namely, we document an increasing number of papers written, tasks undertaken, and languages covered over the course of the past decade. We observe an increase in the sophistication of the methods which researchers deployed in this applied context. Slowly but surely, Legal NLP is …