By K. C. Vijayan, Law Correspondent

THE search for the next dean of the National University of Singapore's law school has now been narrowed down to a short-list of two candidates.

One of them comes from within the faculty - Professor Michael Hor, who specialises in criminal law and has been with NUS for more than 20 years.

The other option is Professor John Phillips from King's College London, who specialises in civil law.

The school's current dean, Professor Tan Cheng Han, who is credited with transforming the law school into one with a global outlook, is due to leave in May next year.

He said: 'The direction to be charted by the next dean will be important as NUS will, for the foreseeable future, continue to be the main provider of legal talent for Singapore.'

Prof Phillips, if selected, could be the first foreign academic to head the law school in its 41-year history.

Since 1968, the post has been filled by local law luminaries beginning with Dr Thio Su Mien and followed by others such as Prof Tommy Koh and Prof S. Jayakumar, who went on to become Law and Home Affairs Minister.

Prof Phillips was the head of the law school at King's College London. He also served as law dean at the University of Western Australia and was a visiting scholar at Harvard University.

His main research areas are in the civil law areas of contract, commercial law and intellectual property.

By contrast, Prof Hor 'delights in all things criminal, constitutional and evidential', according to a write-up on him on the faculty's website. It says he also 'dabbles in law publishing, high-rise gardening and period bread-baking'.

After graduating from NUS in 1984, he completed his further studies at Oxford and the University of Chicago in 1998.

But whoever is named will face three broad challenges of funding, globalisation and competition, said Prof Tan.

'Many of the other leading law schools in the world are much better funded than the NUS law school,' he noted.

'For example, in many top law schools in the United States, the annual tuition fee is around US$40,000 (S$57,000). In addition, these law schools raise millions of dollars each year. To compete against such law schools, NUS Law has had to be both more efficient and more strategic in the use of our resources.

'We have also tried hard to build our endowment and I anticipate that the next dean will have to spend even more time on fund-raising.'

Prof Tan said his successor will also have to consider how globalisation will continue to shape the school's programmes and the staff hired.

He noted that competition for top students and staff had 'intensified' over the last few years which meant NUS had to keep innovating to continue to attract top students and to hire and retain top staff.

'The next dean will have to be alive to where the competitive pressures are coming from,' he said.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.