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 is concerned with how corporate law and governance can and should be used to promote social and environmental good by reducing conflicts of interest. To that end, he has published three monographs with Cambridge University Press: 
A Case for Shareholders’ Fiduciary Duties in Common Law Asia (2019), which won the joint second Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship; Sustainability and Corporate Mechanisms in Asia (2020), and Social Enterprises in Asia: A New Legal Form (2023).

He is also interested in the implications of corporate governance and private law for AI and sustainability. He is co-editor (with Phillip Morgan) of The Cambridge Handbook of Private Law and Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and is 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 top generalist peer reviewed journals such as the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Cambridge Law Journal and the Law Quarterly Review, as well as in leading specialist refereed journals such as the American Journal of Comparative Law.

In recognition of his research, he has been elected to the Robert S Campbell Visiting Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, invited to deliver the 18th Asian Institute of International Financial Law Distinguished Public Lecture at the University of Hong Kong and the keynote lecture at the UCL Centre for Ethics and Law, and awarded the Sir Percy Spender Visiting Fellowship at Sydney Law School. He has also been engaged as an expert witness on Singapore corporate law in the Technology and Construction Court of the High Court of Justice in London.

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.