Event Details
As part of the Ideas Festival 2026, the SMU School of Social Sciences organised a panel last week titled Building Resilient Legal Systems in the Age of AI. The panel was moderated by Jason Grant Allen (Assoc Prof; Director, SMU Centre for Digital Law (CDL)), and featured speakers: Alex Toh (Technology Partner, Magellan La), Anh Nguyen (PhD researcher, University of Amsterdam), Dirk Hartung (Asst Prof, SMUCDL), Han-Wei Liu (Assoc Prof; Deputy Director, SMUCDL), and Rachel Phang (Asst Prof, SMUYPHSL).
With the aim of exploring how resilience can be embedded “by design” into legal institutions, the panellists engaged in a substantive discussion on:
• Power concentration and the shifting dynamics of technological influence
• Information integrity and the challenges posed by AI-driven content ecosystems
• Normative and distributive pressures on legal systems in the digital economy
• Regulatory–technological mismatches and the need for adaptive governance frameworks
The discussion was followed by an interactive audience Q&A, which further enriched the exchange of perspectives on how legal systems can anticipate, absorb, and adapt to technological disruption while continuing to deliver justice, maintain legitimacy, and safeguard fundamental rights.
The panel formed part of the month-long Ideas Festival 2026, themed "Reimagining Resilience: Flourishing in a Changing World", which runs from 26 February to 30 March 2026 in Singapore. Jointly organised by local universities and supported by the Social Science Research Council, the festival showcases the latest insights from social science and humanities research across topics such as AI, sustainability, mental wellbeing, and the future of work.
We thank the organisers and partners of the festival for advancing thoughtful dialogue and interdisciplinary scholarship on the governance of emerging technologies. We look forward to continuing these conversations on building resilient legal frameworks for the age of AI.
