2023 Sheila N. Hayre Prize for Outstanding Capstone Project in Law and Liberal Arts and the 2023 Honourable Mention for Outstanding Capstone Project in Law and Liberal Arts

The Prize is given to recognise students who have produced a capstone project that exemplifies academic rigour and originality and makes a contribution to the field of study. This prize is made possible by the founding president of Yale-NUS College, Professor Pericles Lewis, and is named in honour of his wife, Sheila N. Hayre, who was a senior lecturer at NUS Law.

This year, the Sheila N. Hayre Prize for Outstanding Capstone Project in Law and Liberal Arts goes to Jiang Zhifeng for “Revisiting the Non-Recognition of Territorial Conquests” (supervised by Naoko Shimazu and Antony Anghie). Zhifeng’s paper explores the historical development and origins of the doctrine of `non-recognition’ in international law, especially how it was adapted and deployed by the United States in addressing the complex issues raised by Japan’s war against China in Manchuria. Prof. Shimazu writes, “[T]he depth and width of primary sources research surpasses even most MA level history dissertations … This capstone is an outstanding piece of critical research, making an original intervention to historical and legal scholarship. It is written lucidly, with a rigorous structure, and most persuasively argued. It should be publishable with minor corrections in a scholarly peer-reviewed journal.”

As part of the Prize, Zhifeng will receive a monetary award of SGD 3,000.00 and will be acknowledged at the Yale-NUS Graduation Ceremony on 12 May 2023.

In addition, Shafreen Fatimah deserves the Honourable Mention for Outstanding Capstone Project in Law and Liberal Arts for “The Short-Run Effects of the GDPR on the Valuation of Dark Web Data Commodities” (supervised by Ran Song and Simon Chesterman). Shafreen’s study examines the impact of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation on the trade of data commodities in Dark Net Markets. Analyzing transaction data scraped from Dark Net Markets, Shafreen finds that data protection regulations in the EU significantly increased the price of data commondities in illegal underground markets. Prof. Chesterman writes, “This study is significantly more creative and ambitious than the usual student research project. By choosing to focus on dark web illicit markets, the challenges to gathering good data and analysing it effectively were considerable. Yet the outcome is a genuinely novel and illuminating examination of an old problem: how we can and should value our data.”