Strengthening Singapore's leadership in digital transformation while advancing a 'smart nation' vision that fosters human flourishing for the next century.
Held in Asia for the first time, ICAIL 2026 convened over 250 scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and industry experts from across the globe for a week of discussions on the latest developments in AI and law. Through workshops, tutorials, research presentations, and demonstrations, the conference explored topics including legal reasoning, AI governance, explainability, legal data science, and the growing use of generative AI and AI agents in legal research and practice.
As part of Ideas Festival 2026, SMU School of Social Sciences (SOSS) and the SMU CDL co-organised a panel discussion titled Building Resilient Legal Systems in the Age of AI. Bringing together academics, legal practitioners, and researchers, the panel explored how legal institutions can embed resilience by design in response to rapid technological change. Discussions examined issues including the concentration of technological power, information integrity in AI-driven environments, regulatory and governance challenges, and the evolving role of law in safeguarding justice, legitimacy, and fundamental rights in the digital age.
We hosted the third and final session of the AI & IP Colloquium, supported by Google, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific. This culminating session convened 10 distinguished speakers who presented impactful papers on the legal, regulatory, and policy challenges at the intersection of AI and IP. Click to read more on the Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property in the Asia-Pacific.
We were immensely honoured to welcome The Right Honourable Lord Philip Sales, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom and the Yong Pung How Distinguished Visiting Professor, to deliver the Yong Pung How Distinguished Visiting Professorship Lecture 2025 titled The Application of Public Law Values and Principles in Automated Governance.
SMU CDL hosted its annual Digital Economy Roundtable, continuing a collaboration first launched with partners from the Australian National University (ANU) in 2024. Under the theme Trade at the Crossroads: Supply Chains, Digital Economy & the Future of Multilateralism, the roundtable brought together experts and stakeholders to examine the evolving intersections of trade, investment, technology, and governance.
Singapore’s digital economy is growing twice as fast as the overall economy, driven by enterprise digitalisation and AI adoption. With strong policy innovation and governance efforts, the Tech for Good Institute (TFGI) and SMU CDL recently convened a roundtable to explore how Singapore can stay ahead in the innovation age and frontier technologies, marking the launch of TFGI’s latest regional tech governance report.
Our Guest of Honour, Michael McGrath, EU Commissioner for Democracy, Justice, and Consumer Protection, delivered a compelling keynote and offered insights into the EU and Singapore’s strategies for building a trustworthy digital ecosystem.
Alibaba Group, The McCarthy Institute at ASU Law, and the SMU CDL convened an international seminar on “Intellectual Property in Trade and Digital Commerce” at SMU. The event took place in conjunction with IP Week @ SG 2025, whose theme “Ideas to Assets: Innovating in Times of Change” could not have been more timely. The seminar brought together thought leaders from academia, industry, and government worldwide to examine the future of IP in an era of rapid technological shifts.
The largest 4th Computational Legal Studies Workshop 2025 was held at SMU, where leading academics, researchers, and industry practitioners explore how emerging computational techniques such as AI, machine learning, and network science can be applied to the study and practice of law.
To advance common research priorities under the strategic partnership between Australian National University (ANU) and Singapore Management University (SMU), this global convening brought together leading academics, industry experts, policymakers, and representatives from international organizations to tackle pressing legal and regulatory challenges in the global digital economy.
We were pleased to partner with the Ministry of Law Singapore to co-organise the Online Harms Symposium (25–27 Sept 2023), bringing together global experts, legal professionals, academics, and community leaders to explore solutions for a safer online world.
Our Vision
The SMU Centre for Digital Law’s vision is to become the premier law and technology research centre in Asia, integrating expertise from law, computer science, and digital humanities. The Centre will bolster Singapore’s position as a leader in digital transformation in Asia and advance the vision of a smart nation that fosters human flourishing. Through world-class contributions in foundational and translational research as well as life-long learning, the Centre will influence global discussions on technology’s societal impact, governance, and regulation.
Jason Grant Allen
Director, Centre for Digital Law
Associate Professor of Law
Digital technologies are at the forefront of almost every live issue in 21st century society. Novel technologies expand the space of what humans are able to do, and in that process expand the problem-space of coordinated human social behaviour. While not the only lever we have, law is the paradigm mode of social coordination and often plays a fundamental background role in shaping the other levers (such as markets and informal social norms). In this way, law and legal studies can play a vital role in digital transformation, identifying the issues that matter and providing an organized, structured framework for both traditional legal and inter/cross-disciplinary research that is both conceptually grounded and pragmatic. In this way, the Centre aims not merely observe and describe technological change, but actively to participate in guiding the evolution of our increasingly digital world.
