Simon Chesterman's Blog

The relationship between universities and the societies that fund them has historically rested on an implicit social contract: public investment and institutional autonomy in exchange for economic growth, social mobility, and civic contribution. This article develops a conceptual framework for analysing how that settlement is being renegotiated under conditions of technological disruption and shifting governance […]

[Straits Times] When the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2803 in late 2025, it welcomed the proposed Board of Peace as a transitional mechanism to help implement a plan to end the horrific Gaza conflict. At the time, it appeared to be another pragmatic, time-limited device in the long tradition of ad hoc arrangements endorsed […]

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the organization and practice of research in ways that extend far beyond gains in productivity. AI systems now accelerate discovery, reorganize scholarly labour, and mediate access to expanding scientific literatures. At the same time, generative models capable of producing text, images, and data at scale introduce new epistemic and institutional vulnerabilities. […]

[EJIL] The United Nations Security Council is often criticized for being unrepresentative, paralysed by the veto, and impotent in the face of major conflicts. Yet beneath these familiar complaints lies a more profound dilemma: whether international society still believes in the desirability, let alone the possibility, of a global legal order anchored in the Council. […]

The question of whether artificial systems might one day qualify as legal persons — entities capable of holding rights and duties before the law — has moved from speculative fiction to a matter of practical jurisprudence. For much of the late twentieth century, digital technologies were understood as tools: accelerants of human agency rather than […]

[Straits Times, with Chen Tsuhan] America may soon own TikTok — but not what really matters: the algorithm that decides what we watch, share, and think.   When the United States ordered TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest its American operations or face a ban, it was framed as a national security issue. The […]

[AJCL] “Fake news” is an old problem. In recent years, however, increasing usage of social media as a source of information, the spread of unverified medical advice during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rise of generative artificial intelligence have seen a rush of legislative proposals seeking to minimize or mitigate the impact of false or […]

[AJIL] Artificial intelligence is reshaping science, society, and power. Yet many debates over its likely impact remain fixated on extremes: utopian visions of universal benefit and dystopian fears of existential doom, or an arms race between the U.S. and China, or the Global North and Global South. What’s missing is a serious conversation about distribution […]

Neither law nor technology stand still, so producing a book on Law & Technology is a bit like throwing a boomerang — it keeps coming back at you! Luckily, Law & Technology in Singapore was very much a joint project with my co-editors, Justice Andrew Phang & DAG Yihan Goh, as well as our fantastic […]

[Straits Times, with Loy Hui Chieh] Artificial intelligence will soon surpass knowledge workers in most tasks for which they are trained. Should universities switch from educating the mind to educating the heart? November 30 marks the second anniversary of the release of ChatGPT — though few professors will be celebrating. As the large language model […]