Corporate National Identity: What Lawyers Are Missing
What makes a corporation American, Chinese, Singaporean, or any other nationality – and who gets to decide? The standard legal tests – incorporation, real seat, and corporate control through equity ownership – have long provided a working answer. That answer is no longer sufficient. Corporate national identity has become a site of intense contestation and active reconstruction – a first-order governance issue for boards, states, and markets, with consequences for how cross-border capital moves and how corporate law is made.
The stakes are especially high in Singapore, which has become the preferred redomiciliation destination for major Chinese firms seeking to mitigate geopolitical exposure. For lawyers, business leaders, and policymakers, understanding corporate national identity through the legal facet alone now produces blind spots.
This lecture introduces a framework built around four interrelated facets – legal, economic, (geo)political, and symbolic – that exposes what the traditional legal lens misses. The implications reach across cross-border M&A and investment, corporate governance, investor protection, and the capacity of corporate law to absorb the geopolitical pressures now reshaping it.
This lecture draws on joint work with Curtis Milhaupt (Stanford Law School) and Mariana Pargendler (Harvard Law School).
For more information, please visit the lecture website.
PROGRAMMETime (SGT) | Programme | | 4.30pm | Registration | 5.00pm | Lecture - Corporate National Identity: What Lawyers Are Missing
Professor Dan W. Puchniak
Yong Pung How Professor of Law
Singapore Management University | | 6.15pm | Q&A Session | | 6.30pm | End of Event |
SPEAKER
 Director, Centre for Commercial Law in Asia; Research Member, European Corporate Governance Institute; Inaugural Co-Editor-in-Chief, Cambridge Forum on Corporate Climate Governance journal Dr. Dan W. Puchniak is the Yong Pung How Professor of Law at the Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University, where he directs the Centre for Commercial Law in Asia and is Inaugural Director of the Asian Corporate Law Forum. An internationally recognized scholar of comparative corporate law and governance with a focus on Asia, he is a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute and founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Forum on Corporate Climate Governance. His work, which pioneered the field of intra-Asian comparative corporate law and governance, received the 2023 Cleary Gottlieb Law Prize – widely regarded as the leading annual prize in corporate law scholarship – and has been profiled in The Economist, The Japan Times, and The Business Times. He was also awarded the 2025 YPHSL Most Outstanding Legal Studies Teacher Award. Dan has been a visitor at leading universities including Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, and Tokyo, advised international organizations on corporate law reform in Asia, and served as an expert in complex corporate disputes; his research has been cited by Singapore's apex court. Prior to joining YPHSL, Dan was a tenured member of the NUS Faculty of Law, where he directed the Centre for Asian Legal Studies and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Journal of Comparative Law (Cambridge University Press). | 
Limited seats available. Registration closes on 15 May 2026, or when the lecture is fully subscribed, whichever is earlier. | | | FEEComplimentary | | | FORMATIn-person only | | | DATE & TIME21 May 2026, Thursday
5.00pm to 6.30pm (SGT)
Registration starts at 4.30pm
| | | VENUEFunction Lounge 4.02 Level 4
Singapore Management University, Yong Pung How School of Law
55 Armenian Street
Singapore 179943 | | | PUBLIC CPD POINT1.5 | | | TRAINING CATEGORYCorporate/Commercial | | | PRACTICE AREAGeneral |
| SILE ATTENDANCE POLICYParticipants who wish to obtain CPD Points are reminded that they must comply strictly with the Attendance Policy set out in the CPD Guidelines. For this activity, this includes signing in on arrival and signing out at the conclusion of the activity in the manner required by the organiser, and not being absent from the entire activity for more than 15 minutes. Participants who do not comply with the Attendance Policy will not be able to obtain CPD Points for attending the activity. Please refer to https://www.sileCPDcentre.sg for more information. | | In the course of the event, screenshots / photographs / videos / interviews of participants could be taken/conducted by the organizers or parties appointed by the organisers for the purpose of post-event publicity, either in the organisers' official publication/website, social media platforms or any third party's publication/website/social media platforms approved by the organisers. |
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