The practice of law and development largely functions as a performance to demonstrate the home countries’ internal law to promote its external recognition among the host countries. Since 2011 the government of South Korea has launched the ambitious K-Law Project to promote the diffusion of Korean law to developing countries in Asia and beyond. The K-law project is the practice of law and development, which involves external policy, programs, and actions designed to induce law reform in developing countries under the claim that such reform will contribute to social transformation and economic growth. Korean law and development can be understood as a kind of performance or theatre: Korean state actors present their selective good laws and best legal practices to state audience in developing countries to enhance the international awareness, admiration and imitation of Korean law. More generally, the theatre of law and development may promote one-sided and simplistic information about foreign law, the hegemony of the law of the Global North in comparative law, and consequently legal over-transplants from the Global North to the Global South. Reform of legal reform promotion under the name of development is necessary to reduce the asymmetry of comparative law and support voluntary legal transplants.
SPEAKERS
Professor Ngoc Son Bui
Professor of Asian Laws
Faculty of Law University of Oxford
Ngoc Son Bui is Professor of Asian Laws at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Hugh's College, Oxford. He is a graduate of Vietnam National University-Hanoi (LLB; LLM) and The University of Hong Kong (PhD). He was previously an Assistant Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, and a research fellow at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies of the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law. He has also held visiting positions at Chulalongkorn, Harvard, Melbourne, Nagoya, SMU, Thammasat, and Tsinghua Law Schools.
He works on comparative & constitutional law in Asia with a focus on the socialist and Confucian culture-influenced jurisdictions. He is the author of Legal Reform in the Contemporary Socialist World (Oxford University Press 2024), Constitutional Change in the Contemporary Socialist World (Oxford University Press 2020), and Confucian Constitutionalism in East Asia (Routledge 2016). He is writing a new book, Confucian Law, for Oxford University Press. He is co-editing four volumes on Asian Comparative Constitutional Law for Hart Publishing. He is a series co-editor of the Oxford Studies in Asian Laws and serves in the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Comparative Law.
CHAIR
Professor Dan. W. Puchniak
Yong Pung How Professor of Law; Director of Centre for Commercial Law in Asia
Singapore Management University
DETAILS
Date: 3 August 2026, Monday
Time: 12:00pm to 1:00pm SGT (Registration starts at 11.45am)
Venue: Meeting Room 5-04, Level 5, Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University
[Bento lunch will be provided]
REGISTRATION
Please click HERE to register. Registration closes on 27 July 2026, 12pm SGT or when the workshop is fully subscribed, whichever is earlier.
Successful registrant will receive a confirmation email by 29 July 2026 from ccla@smu.edu.sg to confirm your registration.
