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I am a scholar specializing in comparative business law, with particular research interests in the corporate law and governance of Singapore and Japan, as well as Asia more generally. As a scholarly jurist who teaches both law and non-law students, legal education in its myriad forms is also an area of research for me. Additionally, I am interested in private international law (or conflict of laws). I was elected an Associate Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law / Académie internationale de droit comparé in 2021.

 

I am available for legal expert and consulting work on areas related to my research and teaching interests.

My work has been published or is forthcoming in journals including:

  • American Journal of Comparative Law 

  • University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law

  • Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

  • Washington University Global Studies Law Review

  • Modern Law Review

  • Journal of Corporate Law Studies

  • Law Quarterly Review

  • Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly

  • Asian Journal of Comparative Law

  • Journal of Japanese Law

  • 旬刊商事法務 (Junkan Shōji Hōmu) [Commercial Law Review] (Japan)

  • 金融・商事判例 (Kin’yū Shōji Hanrei) [The Financial and Business Law Precedents]

 

In the context of high-profile international collaborations, I have made or am finalizing contributions to edited collections by Cambridge University Press, Edward Elgar, Mohr Siebeck, and Springer.

As service to Singapore's legal profession and justice system, I co-author the Company Law part of the Singapore Academy of Law Annual Review of Singapore Cases, which critically analyses significant corporate law decisions of the Singapore superior courts (High Court and Court of Appeal) from comparative, practical, and policy perspectives.

My sole-authored book, Shareholder Protection in Close Corporations: Theory, Operation, and Application of Shareholder Withdrawal in Leading Economies (2022), is published by Cambridge University Press in its International Corporate Law and Financial Market Regulation series. In this book, through a comparative legal analysis of a family of legal mechanisms I call 'withdrawal remedies' in four jurisdictions - United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan, I construct two polar models of minority shareholder protection, and propose a model remedy synthesizing aspects of the two models. I also suggest other applications for the 'tripartite method' of comparative law I developed and applied in this book.

In research and teaching, I take the law seriously, both on its own terms as a system of thought and organization, as well as a phenomenon situated within institutional and ideological contexts that are often jurisdiction- and time period-specific. My stance is that law matters sometimes as an empirical reality, and to an extent that is less than what jurists like to believe but probably more than what non-jurists seem to believe. Insofar as my research areas are concerned, I believe that law should (with some exceptions) generally matter more and be taken more seriously than it is right now.

Based in Singapore, I am an Assistant Professor of Law at Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, where I currently teach corporate law and governance from a Singapore perspective. Before that I was a Research Associate at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS) at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore (NUS Law), and an Associate Editor of the Asian Journal of Comparative Law. I also taught contract law as Sheridan Fellow at NUS Law briefly after earning my first law degree. I am called to the Singapore Bar (admitted 2017).

I am a member of various scholarly societies, including:

  • International Academy of Comparative Law / Académie internationale de droit comparé

  • American Society of Comparative Law

  • Academy of Legal Studies in Business

  • European Corporate Governance Institute

  • Society of Legal Scholars

  • Deutsch-Japanischen Juristenvereinigung (German-Japanese Association of Jurists)

I am fluent in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese (both spoken and written), and possess some working proficiency in German (primarily written).

For legal expert / consulting inquiries, please contact me at:

alankkohjuris [AT ] gmail [dot] com

For scholarly purposes, please contact me at:

alan [insert a dot] koh [at] ntu [ dot ] edu [.] sg

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