Faculty Profile

Dan W. Puchniak is the Yong Pung How Professor of Law at the Yong Pung How School of Law (YPHSL), Singapore Management University (SMU), where he directs the Centre for Commercial Law in Asia and is the Inaugural Director of the Asian Corporate Law Forum. He is a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) and a founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Forum on Corporate Climate Governance. 

Dan pioneered the field of intra-Asian comparative corporate law and governance. He has been recognized for both his research and his teaching; among his many honors are the 2023 ECGI Cleary Gottlieb Law Prize – widely regarded as the world's leading annual prize for corporate law scholarship – and the 2025 YPHSL Most Outstanding Legal Studies Teacher Award. His research has been profiled in The Economist, cited by Singapore’s apex court, and published by leading law journals and university presses. He has held visiting positions at Oxford, Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, Tokyo, Seoul National, and Melbourne, among others, and has recently delivered invited lectures at Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He advises international organizations on corporate law reform in Asia and serves as an expert in high-stakes corporate law disputes across the region. 

Prior to joining SMU, Dan spent 14 years at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law (NUS Law), where he held tenure, directed the Centre for Asian Legal Studies, and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Journal of Comparative Law (Cambridge University Press). Before entering academia, he practiced as a corporate-commercial litigator at one of Canada’s leading law firms. In 2027, he will return to Columbia, Stanford, and Tokyo as a visiting professor.
 

Qualifications

• LLD, Kyushu University, Japan
• LLM, Kyushu University, Japan
• LLB, University of Victoria, Canada
• BA, University of Manitoba, Canada
• Barrister & Solicitor (Ontario)

Courses Taught

• LAW494 Comparative Corporate Governance
• LAW662 Comparative Corporate Law and Governance in Asia
• LGST201 Company Law
• LAW701 PhD Research Methods Workshop

Research Areas / Areas of Specialisation

• Comparative Corporate Law and Governance
• Corporate Law and Governance in Asia
• Singapore Corporate Law and Governance
• Japanese Corporate Law and Governance
• Asian and Comparative Law