The 2024 Sheila N. Hayre Prize for Outstanding Capstone Project in Law and Liberal Arts
The 2024 Sheila N. Hayre Prize for Outstanding Capstone Project in Law and Liberal Arts goes to Nicholas Lim Wei-Liang for “Constructing the Chinese in Colonial Burma: The Role of Law in Ethnic Community and Identity Formation,” supervised by Andrew Harding (Law) and Matthew Reeder (History).
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.
Nicholas used historical methods to address the question, “How did structural changes made to the Burmese legal regime during the colonial period (1886-1948) contribute to the development of the Chinese community in Burma?” During the period of British colonial rule in Burma (1886-1948), the ethnic Chinese became a prominent social group which attracted considerable resentment and discrimination from non-Chinese groups. However, they only constituted slightly more than 1% of the population at the time. To understand this puzzle, Nicholas examined legal case records, colonial laws, census results, administrative reports, the memoirs of prominent Chinese and colonial officials, Chinese community organization records, and royal orders (for the pre-colonial period), and focused on three different legal domains: civil litigation, criminal law, and government in the form of advisory or legislative bodies.
Nicholas argues that law and legal institutions, specifically modifications made to them by the British colonial administration, contributed to the development of the Chinese community into a formidable threat in the minds of many non-Chinese. At the same time, these modifications made to the Burmese legal regime substantially strengthened the Chinese in Burma by providing them with powerful new legal benefits, as well as fostering unprecedented cooperation and unity. Nicholas’ capstone is an excellent example of DDP capstones that showcase the dual influence of their LLB and liberal arts education. Both supervisors nominated Nicholas for the prize, praising his capstone for being one of the best they have ever supervised. They both highlighted the quality of his writing, the strength of his original research, as well as the thesis’ scholarly contributions to colonial history, legal studies, and Chinese diasporic studies.
As part of the Prize, Nicholas will receive a monetary award of SGD 3,000.00 and will be acknowledged at the Yale-NUS Graduation Ceremony on 17 May 2024.
