Thio Li-ann - Career As Law Academic

Career As Law Academic

Thio joined the Faculty of Law of the NUS as a Senior Tutor in 1991, and was appointed Lecturer in 1992. That same year she embarked on postgraduate law studies at Harvard Law School on a National University of Singapore Overseas Graduate Scholarship, and obtained a Master of Laws (LL.M.) in 1993. She returned to NUS, where in 1997 she was appointed an Assistant Professor. Between 1997 and 2000 she carried out Ph.D. research at the University of Cambridge on another NUS Overseas Graduate Scholarship, and was duly conferred this degree in 2000. Her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled Managing Babel: The International Legal Protection of Minorities in the Twentieth Century, was subsequently published by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers in 2005. In June 2000 she was appointed an Associate Professor, and achieved the rank of full Professor in July 2006. Her research interests are the following:

• Constitutionalism and human rights in Asia.
• Domestic and comparative perspectives of constitutional law and administrative law.
• International human rights law and the rights of peoples.
• Law and religion.
• Public international law, its history and theory.

Thio was Young Asian Scholar at the Melbourne University Law School in 1997, was ranked as an NUS Excellent Teacher in 2001–2002 and 2002–2003, and was given a Young Researcher Award by NUS in 2004. In March 2006, she was a Visiting Lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong, where she was one of the academics teaching a course on "National Protection of Human Rights". In September of that year she returned to the University of Melbourne as a Senior Fellow of its Graduate Law Programme to teach a course entitled "Constitutionalism in Asian Societies".

Thio served as Chief Editor of the Singapore Journal of International & Comparative Law between 2000 and 2003, and since 2005 has been General Editor of the Asian Yearbook of International Law. She is also on the editorial or advisory boards of the Singapore Yearbook of International Law, the New Zealand Yearbook of International Law (since 2003) and Human Rights & International Legal Discourse (since 2006), and is Corresponding Editor (Singapore) for Blaustein & Flanz's Constitutions of the Countries of the World (since 2001) and the International Journal of Constitutional Law (since 2001). Since 2001 she has also been a contributor on constitutional and administrative law to the Singapore Academy of Law Annual Review of Singapore Cases.

Thio appeared as an expert witness before the Federal Court of Australia in the extradition of Michael McCrea to Singapore to stand trial for murder (2003), and as a consultant to a delegation of the House of Representatives of Japan (30 September 2002) and to the University of Warwick on academic freedom issues (2005).