Jaclyn L Neo
Jaclyn Neo is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law. Her work foregrounds Asian jurisdictions in comparative constitutional law.
A graduate of NUS Law and Yale Law School, Jaclyn is a recipient of multiple academic scholarships, competitive research grants, and research awards.
Her article on domestic incorporation of international human rights law in a dualist state won the Asian Yearbook of International Law’s DILA International Law Prize. She was also recently awarded the inaugural SHAPE-SEA Research Award in 2017 for her research on religious freedom in Southeast Asia.
Jaclyn has delivered papers and lectures by invitation at numerous universities the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Chile, and Vietnam. She has also been a visiting researcher at several universities including Frankfurt, Münster, and Leiden, and was most recently a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Fellow with the ARC Laureate Project in Comparative Constitutional Law at Melbourne Law School. While at Yale, Jaclyn co-founded the Yale Law School’s Debating Law and Religion Series as well as the YLS Doctoral Scholarship Conference.
Jaclyn was recently appointed Professorial Fellow to the Attorney-General's Chambers' Academy in Singapore.
A graduate of NUS Law and Yale Law School, Jaclyn is a recipient of multiple academic scholarships, competitive research grants, and research awards.
Her article on domestic incorporation of international human rights law in a dualist state won the Asian Yearbook of International Law’s DILA International Law Prize. She was also recently awarded the inaugural SHAPE-SEA Research Award in 2017 for her research on religious freedom in Southeast Asia.
Jaclyn has delivered papers and lectures by invitation at numerous universities the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Chile, and Vietnam. She has also been a visiting researcher at several universities including Frankfurt, Münster, and Leiden, and was most recently a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Fellow with the ARC Laureate Project in Comparative Constitutional Law at Melbourne Law School. While at Yale, Jaclyn co-founded the Yale Law School’s Debating Law and Religion Series as well as the YLS Doctoral Scholarship Conference.
Jaclyn was recently appointed Professorial Fellow to the Attorney-General's Chambers' Academy in Singapore.
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1. Jaclyn Neo & Bui Ngoc Son, Expanding the Universe of Comparative Constitutional Amendments in Southeast Asia.
2. Dian A.H. Shah, Post-Soeharto Constitutional Amendment in Indonesia: Promises and Pitfalls
3. Jaclyn Neo & Andrea Ong, Making the Singapore Constitution: Amendments as Constitution-Making
4. Ratana Taing, Constitutional Change and Amendment in Cambodia
5. HP Lee, Richard Foo, & Amber Tan, Constitutional Change in Malaysia
6. Dan Gatmaytan, Constitutional Change as Suspect Projects: The Philippines
7. Andrew Harding, Constitutional Amendment and Problems of Transition in Myanmar
8. Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang, Constitutional Amendment in Thailand: Amending in the Spectre of Parliamentary Dictatorship
9. Yaniv Roznai, Constitutional Amendability and Unamendability in South-East Asia
10. Rosalind Dixon, (Why) Comparative Constitutional Amendment in Southeast Asia
of social as well as political life. The state has to encounter religion and vice versa.
Thinking about the regulation of religion nonetheless requires an expanded concept of regulation. Indeed, the edited volume Regulating Religion: Case Studies from Around the Globe approaches the idea of regulating religion as “legal efforts to exert social control over such groups, especially through court cases, but also with selected major legislative attempts to regulate religious groups.” Another author defines regulating religion as “any treatment and practice from the state apparatus toward religious groups, or religious beliefs, or religious symbolism in a particular given nation-state based on the prescribed system of laws.” This use of the term regulation differs from the narrower conception of regulation that is commonly used in scholarship on the regulatory state. That scholarship tends to see regulation as the activities of an independent regulatory agency, set up by or facilitated by the government, to exercise regulatory functions outside of governmental functions, typically focusing on efficiency maximization. In contrast, there is now increasing recognition that regulation is a polycentric exercise that not only involves public actors and targets economic activities but also does more. Accordingly, in this chapter, I propose a modified version of what Koop and Lodge has proposed as an essence-based definition of the regulation of religion. I define regulation of religion as the intentional intervention in the activities of religious individuals and communities, whether direct or indirect, through binding law or otherwise, and whether conducted by a public sector or private sector actors.
Adopting an expanded idea of regulation, this chapter sets out a preliminary framework for inquiry. It argues that such a focus on regulation pluralizes and complexifies the state’s relationship with religion, extending the analysis beyond the traditional constitutional law and private (family) law approaches. It then identifies a range of regulatory approaches and provides illustrations of how these approaches are used to understand the regulation of religion. Lastly, it examines the regimes of regulation as differentiated by liberal versus nonliberal constraints. In doing all of these, it must be conceded that this chapter takes as its starting premise that the state does regulate religion, rather than whether the state can or should regulate religion.
Thus, amendments to the Constitution between 1979 and 1991 should be seen as a long process of accretion that gradually brought about a Constitution that could be said to have attained its character as a supreme law. This is reflected not only in political discourse but also in constitutional jurisprudence. This article thus examines how the constitution has been changed through the amendment process, interrogates the discourse over the amendments, and evaluates the final outcomes in Singapore.
Home Affairs asserting that all power has legal limits has been
declared to be a principle of legality that functions as a “basic
principle” in constitutional and administrative judicial
review. This article provides a close examination of case
jurisprudence in Singapore to determine exactly how this
passage has influenced the development of this area of law.
Specifically, it argues that while the principle of legality has
been used to justify and expand reviewability of both
statutory and constitutional executive powers, there is scope
to develop the principle to further extend the scope of
reviewability as well as to justify a more robust approach to
judicial review in Singapore.
1. Jaclyn Neo & Bui Ngoc Son, Expanding the Universe of Comparative Constitutional Amendments in Southeast Asia.
2. Dian A.H. Shah, Post-Soeharto Constitutional Amendment in Indonesia: Promises and Pitfalls
3. Jaclyn Neo & Andrea Ong, Making the Singapore Constitution: Amendments as Constitution-Making
4. Ratana Taing, Constitutional Change and Amendment in Cambodia
5. HP Lee, Richard Foo, & Amber Tan, Constitutional Change in Malaysia
6. Dan Gatmaytan, Constitutional Change as Suspect Projects: The Philippines
7. Andrew Harding, Constitutional Amendment and Problems of Transition in Myanmar
8. Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang, Constitutional Amendment in Thailand: Amending in the Spectre of Parliamentary Dictatorship
9. Yaniv Roznai, Constitutional Amendability and Unamendability in South-East Asia
10. Rosalind Dixon, (Why) Comparative Constitutional Amendment in Southeast Asia
of social as well as political life. The state has to encounter religion and vice versa.
Thinking about the regulation of religion nonetheless requires an expanded concept of regulation. Indeed, the edited volume Regulating Religion: Case Studies from Around the Globe approaches the idea of regulating religion as “legal efforts to exert social control over such groups, especially through court cases, but also with selected major legislative attempts to regulate religious groups.” Another author defines regulating religion as “any treatment and practice from the state apparatus toward religious groups, or religious beliefs, or religious symbolism in a particular given nation-state based on the prescribed system of laws.” This use of the term regulation differs from the narrower conception of regulation that is commonly used in scholarship on the regulatory state. That scholarship tends to see regulation as the activities of an independent regulatory agency, set up by or facilitated by the government, to exercise regulatory functions outside of governmental functions, typically focusing on efficiency maximization. In contrast, there is now increasing recognition that regulation is a polycentric exercise that not only involves public actors and targets economic activities but also does more. Accordingly, in this chapter, I propose a modified version of what Koop and Lodge has proposed as an essence-based definition of the regulation of religion. I define regulation of religion as the intentional intervention in the activities of religious individuals and communities, whether direct or indirect, through binding law or otherwise, and whether conducted by a public sector or private sector actors.
Adopting an expanded idea of regulation, this chapter sets out a preliminary framework for inquiry. It argues that such a focus on regulation pluralizes and complexifies the state’s relationship with religion, extending the analysis beyond the traditional constitutional law and private (family) law approaches. It then identifies a range of regulatory approaches and provides illustrations of how these approaches are used to understand the regulation of religion. Lastly, it examines the regimes of regulation as differentiated by liberal versus nonliberal constraints. In doing all of these, it must be conceded that this chapter takes as its starting premise that the state does regulate religion, rather than whether the state can or should regulate religion.
Thus, amendments to the Constitution between 1979 and 1991 should be seen as a long process of accretion that gradually brought about a Constitution that could be said to have attained its character as a supreme law. This is reflected not only in political discourse but also in constitutional jurisprudence. This article thus examines how the constitution has been changed through the amendment process, interrogates the discourse over the amendments, and evaluates the final outcomes in Singapore.
Home Affairs asserting that all power has legal limits has been
declared to be a principle of legality that functions as a “basic
principle” in constitutional and administrative judicial
review. This article provides a close examination of case
jurisprudence in Singapore to determine exactly how this
passage has influenced the development of this area of law.
Specifically, it argues that while the principle of legality has
been used to justify and expand reviewability of both
statutory and constitutional executive powers, there is scope
to develop the principle to further extend the scope of
reviewability as well as to justify a more robust approach to
judicial review in Singapore.
In this chapter, I argue that the primary organizing factor in the state’s structure of governance of religious communities is whether they are regarded as private or public subjects of regulation. The consideration of whether religious communities are conceptualized as private actors or public actors is integral for the purposes of organizing structural approaches to the regulation of religious communities in multicultural polities. This itself reflects whether the state conceptualizes society as being a community of individuals or of ‘nations’. Where religious communities are private actors, they are treated like associations and their members interact with the state primarily as individuals. Where religious communities are treated as public actors, the communal aspect of those communities tends to be emphasized, often over the individual interests within the community. Consequently, the primary regulatory approach towards private religion tends to be one of self-regulation, in addition to general statutory regulation. In comparison, where religious communities are treated as public actors, the state relies on a broader range of regulatory approaches, namely religion-specific statutory regulation, co-regulation, in addition to self-regulation. This article therefore examines the particular challenge of multicultural polities, introduces the modes and dimensions of regulation, dominant approaches to regulating religious communities as public or private subjects, and lastly, the ideological postures that determines the regulatory reach of the state.
The text of the constitutional provision addressing religious freedom is an important but only one factor determining the levels of protection in a country. However, de jure provisions do not necessarily translate to de facto protection. As Madeley observes, in most cases, “constitutional promises of religious freedom provide only a distally uncertain indication of actual conditions pertaining to religious freedom and unfreeedom.” A variety of factors affect the level of legal protection of religious freedom. These include the constitutional relationship between state and religion, the type of political regime, its stability, and the regime’s commitment to international human rights treaties. In addition, socio-historical factors that also affect the levels of religious freedom protection include religious demography, the nature of the dominant religion, as well as the historical relationships among religious groups.
Asia thus presents a challenging and fascinating region for the study of religious freedom. Asian states diverge widely in terms of their constitutional state and religion arrangements, ranging from states that are hostile to religion to those that merely distance themselves from religion to those that adopt a particular religion as the state religion. Within the region, political arrangements also differ widely; from liberal democracies, authoritarian democracies, socialist or communist regimes, and to absolute monarchies. Added to this mix is the demographic range; Asia is the most religiously diverse regions in the world. According to a comprehensive 2014 Pew Research study, half of the world’s most religiously diverse countries are in the Asia-Pacific region. The study ranked Singapore, Taiwan, and Vietnam as the top three most religiously diverse countries in the world, while South Korea, China, and Hong Kong are among countries with very high levels of religious diversity. Others in the region have high or moderate levels of religious diversity. Indeed, only a handful of Asian countries are ranked with low levels of religious diversity: Timor-Leste (East Timor), the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Religious demography can have significant impact on religious freedom. Jonathan Fox’s recent study of Southeast Asia, for instance, focuses on the type of majority/plurality religion, whereby he argues that “patterns of religious freedom differ significantly based on the country’s largest religion.” His study concludes that there is religious regulation, religious discrimination, and support for religion is strong in Muslim-majority countries (i.e. Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia) and weak in Christian-majority countries (i.e. Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and Timor Leste) in Southeast Asia. There is however no consistent patter among Buddhist majority or plurality countries that he identifies (i.e. Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam).
Recognizing that there are these manifold and complex factors, this chapter however focuses on the intersections of constitutional state-religion arrangements and the scope of religious freedom protection in countries in Asia. It takes the position that religious freedom claims are critically shaped by constitutional arrangements of state and religion, and suggests four broad groupings to organize the various Asian jurisdictions. The purpose of identifying these broad groupings is to highlight the main religious freedom questions that have been the main focus in various Asian jurisdictions. These are not issues that are unique to Asian jurisdictions, but an analysis that takes the Asian experience as the starting point is crucial so as not to obscure particular contexts within the region. It should here be clarified that while the analysis identifies formal arrangements reflected in the constitutional text, it takes seriously actual constitutional practice.
This article examines the normative force and limits of article 22 of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration ('AHRD') to advance the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion among ASEAN Member States. It argues that efforts to advance this freedom based on the AHRD is likely to be hampered by two constraints-one external to the document and one internal to the document. The external challenge is that there is no baseline consensus upon which to build a core understanding of the content of the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion due to competing visions of freedom of religion. The internal constraint stems from the various provisions within the AHRD that appears to grant states significant discretion in defining the content and scope of human rights. In examining these constraints, this article seeks to inform a broader enquiry as to the AHRD's potential as a regional human rights instrument.
These functions are likely to overlap, although each targets a different audience and thus structures a different conversation. In its self-regulatory function, a code’s main target audience is judges. It provides them with a written basis for asserting peer pressure or even internal sanctions on one another. In its assertive function, a code provides judges with a written basis for objecting to real and/or perceived interference and incursions into their independent and impartial conduct of the administration of justice. In its public confidence function, a code provides the framework for the relationship between the judiciary and the public, communicating to the public the type and scope of proper judicial conduct. It thus plays an educative role and also provides the public with a potential basis for requiring compliance by the judiciary. Lastly, a judicial code for governmental control serves as a directive to the judiciary and could be seen as effectively subordinating judicial power to the other branches of government. This last objective must be distinguished from the other three because it has the greatest potential to interfere with judicial independence.
The type of function that a judicial code of conduct is envisaged to serve within a jurisdiction reflects the values that underpin the judicial system. As Devlin and Dodek point out in the Introduction, the values of the judicial system serve as a foundation for the entire judicial edifice. Employing the regulatory pyramid as proposed by Devlin and Dodek, judicial codes of conduct are part of the processes through which the judiciary is maintained, channelled or restrained. Codes of conduct give form to the core values of the judicial system. While they are not strictly speaking institutional, since not all judicial codes establish bureaucratic forms to address breaches, codes of conduct are crucial in that they help to institutionalize good practices that advance the values of the judicial system. Judicial codes that are most obviously process oriented are those that serve the self-regulatory, assertive and governmental control functions. Interestingly, the public confidence function is oriented towards another wall of the regulatory pyramid, which are the outcomes.
This chapter examines the use and disuse of judicial codes of conduct by investigating the curious case of Malaysia. Malaysia first prescribed a Judges’ Code of Ethics in 1994, and then replaced it in 2009 with a more extensive code which established a procedure for complaints and investigation beyond the previous procedure. The codes primarily served the objectives of self-regulation and in restoring public confidence. However, because the codes were passed by Parliament in the wake of incidents involving executive incursions and charges of corruption, it is arguable that these codes also serve the purpose of governmental control of the judiciary. In studying the establishment of a judicial code of ethics in Malaysia, this chapter examines the functions codes of ethics can and do have within the country’s broader legal, political and social context. It further analyses the adoption and use of codes of ethics in Malaysia using the regulatory pyramid proposed by the editors. Specifically, it considers the values that are supposedly underpinned by the codes, the role that the codes has played in maintaining the judiciary, and the desired outcomes.