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Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon: SingHealth Academic Hour - Distinguished Leaders Series 2025
SINGHEALTH ACADEMIC HOUR –
DISTINGUISHED LEADERS SERIES 2025
“The Judiciary in a Changing World”
Friday, 7 March 2025
The Honourable the Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon*
Supreme Court of Singapore
Professor Ng Wai Hoe, Group Chief Executive Officer of SingHealth
SingHealth leaders and staff
Ladies and gentlemen
I. Introduction
1. Good afternoon. Let me first thank the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre for inviting me to speak to you on the topic of managing change. The world that we all operate in today is a highly dynamic one; and, in many ways, we are living in times that are characterised by change that is both rapid and often dramatic. Indeed, within just the past five years, we have witnessed how our societies, systems and established ways of doing things have been disrupted and transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic and then by some remarkable breakthroughs in generative artificial intelligence (or “AI”). Amidst all of this, the institutions that have long served as pillars of our society – including institutions in the fields of healthcare and the administration of justice – have had to contend with the growing phenomenon of truth degradation and declining levels of trust while still being called upon to adapt to meet these changes, and to continue to provide stability to anchor our communities in these times of transformation.
2. It is in this light that I come to the central subject of my address today: that is, to share with you the work that the Singapore Courts have done, and will continue to do, to respond to the needs and challenges of a changing world.
II. Challenges faced by the courts
3. Before I develop this, let me first elaborate a little on some of the specific changes that have impacted the courts, and the challenges that these changes have given rise to. I want to focus on four such challenges.
4. The first is the proliferation of disinformation in public discourse, and this is something that is happening around the world – a phenomenon that has been labelled “truth decay”.1 This has been accompanied by declining trust in public institutions.2 Truth decay poses a particularly pernicious threat to the courts, because our fundamental work is the pursuit of truth.3 But truth decay is deeply damaging in any field that is based on fact and reasoned decision-making, because it hampers our ability to engage meaningfully with one another and to work together constructively towards developing sensible solutions to the issues that confront us. This is equally true in your field as we saw the consequence of all sorts of claims, theories and counterclaims surrounding the COVID-19 virus and the worldwide effort to manage the global public health crisis that it gave rise to.
5. The second challenge arises from the transformative impact of technological advancements, especially in generative AI. It has been a little over two years since OpenAI released its early demo of ChatGPT in November 2022,4 and in that time, the capabilities of generative AI tools have grown at a mind-boggling rate. Last November, OpenAI released its o1 models, which are said to be more accurate and more capable of solving complex tasks compared to previous models, and which allegedly demonstrate reasoning abilities. But there are yet more developments on the horizon. In just the few months since this year began, OpenAI has released its new o3 models, which surpass the o1 models in speed, accuracy and performance;5 while the Chinese startup DeepSeek has launched its “DeepSeek R1” model, which is said to rival the capabilities of OpenAI’s models and to have been developed at a fraction of the cost that OpenAI incurred.6 Developments like these have forced courts around the world to confront questions of the proper limits and regulation of the use of AI in the justice system, and have required us to think urgently about how we can ensure that technological advancements do not outpace our ability to safeguard the fair and effective administration of justice, while at the same time striving to harness their tremendous potential to advance our goals.
6. The third challenge is the global access to justice deficit. In 2019, the World Justice Project estimated that two-thirds of the world’s population had “unmet justice needs”, mainly because they faced obstacles in the way of resolving basic civil and criminal justice problems, or lacked the tools to protect their rights.7 In 2021, two years later, the World Justice Project found that the pandemic had “intensif[ied] the access to justice crisis”.8 This fits in with other studies that show that wealth inequality intensified during the pandemic. And when the World Justice Project studied global access to justice trends further in 2023, it found that there were significant wealth-based disparities in access to justice across the world, and that the overall supply of justice services was not keeping pace with the growing demand for justice solutions.9 While obstacles to accessing justice are not new, the need to address them has become more urgent because of several changing features of our operating environment. For one thing, a significant component of actual and potential court users today are self-represented persons, which requires us to ensure that all parties, and especially self-represented persons, have a realistic opportunity to commence or defend a claim, and a fair chance to present their cases, regardless of their resources or legal literacy.10 For another, with the growing complexity of the law, the explosion of information and the limited supply of lawyers, legal services have become more expensive and may be beyond the reach of many, such that it will typically not be viable to engage lawyers for smaller and more routine matters. Yet, we cannot simply do nothing about this. If we are to safeguard public trust in our justice systems, it will be crucial for us to ensure that our justice systems do not become, or come to be perceived as, the exclusive preserve of a privileged few. We cannot let it be felt that justice is beyond the reach of ordinary people.11 We must therefore look for innovative solutions.
7. The fourth challenge that confronts the courts today is, in some ways, change itself. Changes in societies, brought about by developments like advances in technology, will find expression in the changing nature and complexion of the disputes that come before the courts. For instance, the growing capabilities and prevalence of generative AI have thrown up legal questions regarding whether AI-generated output can be protected by copyright law, and whether the use of the data of others to train AI models infringes the intellectual property rights of human creators of those other materials. To manage and determine such disputes effectively, judges must be adept at navigating both the existing and the emerging areas of law, and will also need to develop some degree of multi-disciplinary knowledge in adjacent fields. But the vast amounts of information in these diverse bodies of knowledge, and the fast-paced nature of developments in these fields, will mean that knowing how to manage these changes will itself become an essential skill for the judges of tomorrow.12
8. I have outlined each of these four challenges with a focus primarily on how they affect the work of the courts. But we can see that many of their elements and features will also apply in other fields, including in particular yours – the healthcare field. And, especially when they are taken together, they present a compelling case for our institutions to adapt and evolve with the times. Indeed, I suggest that it will be critical for institutions today to be responsive and forward-looking in anticipating and managing change, in order for them to continue to provide stability, assurance and leadership to the communities that they serve.
6. The third challenge is the global access to justice deficit. In 2019, the World Justice Project estimated that two-thirds of the world’s population had “unmet justice needs”, mainly because they faced obstacles in the way of resolving basic civil and criminal justice problems, or lacked the tools to protect their rights.7 In 2021, two years later, the World Justice Project found that the pandemic had “intensif[ied] the access to justice crisis”.8 This fits in with other studies that show that wealth inequality intensified during the pandemic. And when the World Justice Project studied global access to justice trends further in 2023, it found that there were significant wealth-based disparities in access to justice across the world, and that the overall supply of justice services was not keeping pace with the growing demand for justice solutions.9 While obstacles to accessing justice are not new, the need to address them has become more urgent because of several changing features of our operating environment. For one thing, a significant component of actual and potential court users today are self-represented persons, which requires us to ensure that all parties, and especially self-represented persons, have a realistic opportunity to commence or defend a claim, and a fair chance to present their cases, regardless of their resources or legal literacy.10 For another, with the growing complexity of the law, the explosion of information and the limited supply of lawyers, legal services have become more expensive and may be beyond the reach of many, such that it will typically not be viable to engage lawyers for smaller and more routine matters. Yet, we cannot simply do nothing about this. If we are to safeguard public trust in our justice systems, it will be crucial for us to ensure that our justice systems do not become, or come to be perceived as, the exclusive preserve of a privileged few. We cannot let it be felt that justice is beyond the reach of ordinary people.11 We must therefore look for innovative solutions.
7. The fourth challenge that confronts the courts today is, in some ways, change itself. Changes in societies, brought about by developments like advances in technology, will find expression in the changing nature and complexion of the disputes that come before the courts. For instance, the growing capabilities and prevalence of generative AI have thrown up legal questions regarding whether AI-generated output can be protected by copyright law, and whether the use of the data of others to train AI models infringes the intellectual property rights of human creators of those other materials. To manage and determine such disputes effectively, judges must be adept at navigating both the existing and the emerging areas of law, and will also need to develop some degree of multi-disciplinary knowledge in adjacent fields. But the vast amounts of information in these diverse bodies of knowledge, and the fast-paced nature of developments in these fields, will mean that knowing how to manage these changes will itself become an essential skill for the judges of tomorrow.12
8. I have outlined each of these four challenges with a focus primarily on how they affect the work of the courts. But we can see that many of their elements and features will also apply in other fields, including in particular yours – the healthcare field. And, especially when they are taken together, they present a compelling case for our institutions to adapt and evolve with the times. Indeed, I suggest that it will be critical for institutions today to be responsive and forward-looking in anticipating and managing change, in order for them to continue to provide stability, assurance and leadership to the communities that they serve.
III. Answering the call for change
9. So, what have the Singapore Courts done to respond to these challenges? Let me provide just a brief overview of the efforts we have undertaken in five main areas:
(a) first, public communications and outreach;
(b) second, technology and innovation;
(c) third, access to justice;
(d) fourth, judicial education and training; and
(e) fifth, international engagement.
A. Public communications and outreach
10. I want to begin with the investment we have made in public communications and outreach because, in some ways, this marked a turning point in the transformation of our understanding of our role as courts. Courts have historically stood back and observed very strict lines on what they think they can or should do. In 2019, we were addressed by a team from the Institute of Policy Studies in Singapore on the subject of public trust. To their tremendous credit, they identified the collapse of public trust as a defining trend of our generation some months or years before this trend really took hold. And they cautioned us in 2019 that even in Singapore, and even with a trusted institution like the Judiciary, we should not imagine that we were somehow immune. They suggested that the first thing we should consider was stepping up our communication and outreach efforts because if we didn’t, we would be seen as not valuing transparency, and worse, others would then control the narrative about us and our work. This was a startling shift in perspective for us. We quickly resolved to work actively to promote public understanding of the work of the courts. I emphasise that this was a significant shift from the traditional view that the courts should hold themselves aloof from the public, and simply let their judgments speak for themselves. We recognised that, in an era where the Internet and social media have made it possible for all kinds of narratives, including especially falsehoods, to gain widespread traction at staggering speeds, it was ever more important that the courts provide an authoritative and readily accessible source of accurate information. And this information should relate to our work in particular, in order to dispel myths, correct misconceptions, and combat disinformation. With this in mind, we took steps to foster a deeper understanding of how the courts generally approach the task of deciding cases, as well as an appreciation of the limits of what the courts can do, especially in cases that involve socially polarising issues.13
11. To this end, the Singapore Courts have in recent years published all written judgments issued by the Supreme Court since 2000 on our website,14 and these are accompanied by summaries of the more significant judgments that are prepared to assist lay readers in understanding these judgments. Since September 2023, the Singapore Courts have also had an official WhatsApp channel, where notable decisions are summarised in a few sentences that are pushed out to more than 16,000 subscribers.15 And late last year, the Singapore Courts also established a presence on Instagram and TikTok to increase our engagement with younger audiences, which constitute a critical constituency for us. Beyond enhancing the accessibility of our day-to-day work and processes, we have also sought proactively to reach out to a wider audience, and we did this through a series of what we called “Conversations with the Community”, where our judges led sessions exploring and explaining various aspects of our work, ranging from constitutional and administrative law,16 to family justice,17 to environmental law and climate change litigation.18 As the title of the series suggests, these Conversations were designed to engage the broader community, beyond the legal profession – and those in attendance included, for example, members of ministries and statutory boards, Community Development Councils, and social service agencies. There were a total of seven speeches and Q&A sessions that took place, and we have plans to reproduce that material in the form of an e-book that may be made freely available so that anyone can access this material and understand more about what the courts do and how we go about doing it.
11. To this end, the Singapore Courts have in recent years published all written judgments issued by the Supreme Court since 2000 on our website,14 and these are accompanied by summaries of the more significant judgments that are prepared to assist lay readers in understanding these judgments. Since September 2023, the Singapore Courts have also had an official WhatsApp channel, where notable decisions are summarised in a few sentences that are pushed out to more than 16,000 subscribers.15 And late last year, the Singapore Courts also established a presence on Instagram and TikTok to increase our engagement with younger audiences, which constitute a critical constituency for us. Beyond enhancing the accessibility of our day-to-day work and processes, we have also sought proactively to reach out to a wider audience, and we did this through a series of what we called “Conversations with the Community”, where our judges led sessions exploring and explaining various aspects of our work, ranging from constitutional and administrative law,16 to family justice,17 to environmental law and climate change litigation.18 As the title of the series suggests, these Conversations were designed to engage the broader community, beyond the legal profession – and those in attendance included, for example, members of ministries and statutory boards, Community Development Councils, and social service agencies. There were a total of seven speeches and Q&A sessions that took place, and we have plans to reproduce that material in the form of an e-book that may be made freely available so that anyone can access this material and understand more about what the courts do and how we go about doing it.
B. Technology and innovation
12. The second area I want to highlight is our work in technology and innovation – and more specifically, what we have done both to regulate and to explore the use of technology in the courts.
13. Let me first touch on our efforts to regulate the use of new technologies in our courts, focusing on generative AI. Last September, the Singapore Courts issued a Guide on the use of generative AI tools by court users. The Guide sets out some general information regarding such tools – such as how they work and why their output is not always accurate – and the general principles that govern their use in court proceedings, such as the responsibility of court users to ensure that the material they put before the court is independently verified, accurate and appropriate. The Guide also offers practical guidance on the use of generative AI tools, such as what steps should be taken to ensure accuracy and to respect intellectual property rights in the court documents that a user submits.19 We set out these points for the benefit of our users, but our basic regulatory approach was simply to emphasise that regardless of what tools they use, our users remain responsible for whatever they put before us. It is not open to them, in any circumstances, to try to blame the technology. We took this approach, which is somewhat different from the more prescriptive approaches to the use of AI adopted by some other courts, for two basic reasons. First, with the pervasiveness of AI in a wide range of commonly used software, any attempt to be more prescriptive in our regulatory approach would have been extremely difficult to implement and impossible to police. Even Microsoft Office, for example, has AI features embedded within it. And second, the rapid rate at which change has been taking place would mean that we would have to spend enormous resources to constantly try to chase the latest developments.
14. Beyond this, we have also devoted considerable effort to exploring how we can use technology to improve the experience of court users. One significant development, which enabled us to reduce the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to the functioning of the courts,20 was our pivot to remote hearings conducted through video-conferencing, at least for certain kinds of hearings.21 More recently, we have turned our attention to the transformative potential of AI tools to help self-represented persons navigate court processes that have traditionally been designed with lawyers and judges, rather than laypersons, in mind. We have therefore been thinking about how we can incorporate AI to empower self-represented persons to participate meaningfully in our processes without having to incur the cost of legal representation, which can sometimes be prohibitive.22
15. One category of cases where these tools may prove especially useful are those in our Small Claims Tribunals (or “SCTs”), which hear certain kinds of relatively simple claims for sums not exceeding $20,000 – such as disputes involving contracts for the sale of goods or provision of services. These are the types of disputes that members of the public are perhaps most likely to face in their daily lives,23 and around 10,000 of these cases are filed in the SCTs each year.24 It is against this background that the Singapore Courts have embarked on a pioneering collaboration with the specialist legal AI start-up Harvey to develop an AI-powered programme to assist self-represented persons with filing their claims in our SCTs. This aims to help self-represented persons understand what sort of evidence they need to produce; help them present their cases, draft their submissions and summarise what the other side has filed; help them organise their materials; and, in time, perhaps even provide them with a prediction of what is likely to happen and an assessment of their chances of success.25 Perhaps rather ironically, the vast majority of cases that are caught in the access to justice deficit are these kinds of relatively small, relatively routine cases where there are currently a variety of practical obstacles that stand in the way of accessing justice, and generative AI can go a long way in helping to bridge these gaps. We have also begun work on using Harvey to translate court correspondence into the Chinese and Malay languages, which many of our court users are more comfortable with than English.
C. Access to justice
16. Our Harvey collaboration is thus one illustration of the potential role that technology can play in advancing access to justice, which is the third area of the Singapore Courts’ work that I will touch on today. Technology can help bridge the gaps that might otherwise prevent self-represented persons from vindicating their rights through the court process, and it can do so in ways and at a scale that simply would not be possible if we were to rely on human industry alone. But our efforts do not start and end with the use of new technologies. Instead, they can and should take various forms, keeping in mind the varied needs of the communities that we serve. In 2023, we established the Access to Justice (or “A2J”) Programme Office, which has been central in driving and overseeing our efforts to transform our whole Judiciary into a more outward-looking and user-centric organisation. The A2J Programme Office has completed 14 projects since its establishment, and many more are in the pipeline.26 For example, it has developed a “Digital Guided Questionnaire” with a series of simple questions to help court users navigate the large volume of useful information on the Judiciary’s website and find the information they need to answer the legal questions they have.27 We have also worked on simplifying the language used in our correspondence templates, and we have received feedback from lay users that the simplified versions are far more understandable and accessible.
17. Let me give just one other example. In January this year, we launched a video series titled “Your Guide to Attending Court”, consisting of five 90-second videos covering topics including how to locate the various courts and courtrooms, the setup of a courtroom, court etiquette and essential “dos and don’ts”, and what to expect during and after a court hearing. There are versions of each of these videos with English, Tamil, Malay and Mandarin subtitles, to ensure that they are accessible to as many people as possible. These videos can be found on the Singapore Courts’ website28 and our YouTube channel,29 and are also screened at the Service Hubs of our Supreme Court, State Courts and Family Justice Courts. It is our hope that efforts like these will demystify the court process for laypersons who may otherwise find that process prohibitive, intimidating, unfriendly and negative; and instead help them to have as productive and even pleasant an experience with the justice system as is possible.
D. Judicial education and training
18. I turn from court users to our judges and judicial officers, and to the fourth area where the Singapore Courts have worked hard to ensure that we are in a better position to meet the needs of a changing world: judicial education and training. We established the Singapore Judicial College (or “SJC”) in 2015 to institutionalise and pull together the various judicial education programmes that had been developed in each of the different courts or parts of our judiciary.30 Since then, the SJC has made considerable progress towards its objective of becoming a world-class institute for higher judicial education and research.31 Through the SJC, we have invested significantly in continuing judicial education and training to ensure that our judges and judicial officers are equipped with the skills, competencies and resources that they need to discharge their duties with excellence, and to enable their own professional development to keep pace with new and evolving demands. More fundamentally, what underpins all of this is our emphasis on our pedagogic method and philosophy, which is for judges to see their role as “learning judges” – that is, to have a personal commitment to a mindset of lifelong and self-directed learning.32 The SJC makes numerous resources available to judges, but it is up to individual judges to chart their own development roadmaps and to attend the courses that they need to develop their own competencies over time. Given the dynamic environment in which our judges do their work today, and the rapidly changing nature of the fields that are engaged in that work, it is absolutely essential for our judges and judicial officers not only to learn, but to learn how to learn effectively, and continuously, throughout their careers. They need to take ownership of their own learning journeys.
E. International engagement
19. Let me finally touch briefly on the fifth area in which the Singapore Courts have sought to adapt to a changing world, and that is by looking outwards at other jurisdictions and the broader international community of which we are a part. I spoke earlier about one of the challenges confronting the courts today being change itself, and its fast-paced nature. Many of these changes transcend jurisdictional boundaries – think, for instance, of the legal, ethical and practical issues posed by artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, or by climate change or the management of complex cross-border insolvency proceedings. In areas like these, there is a great deal that we can learn from collaborating and sharing our experiences with our counterparts in other like-minded jurisdictions.
20. Perhaps the most significant step we have taken so far to internationalise our Judiciary has been the establishment of the Singapore International Commercial Court (or “SICC”), which celebrated its tenth anniversary this January. The SICC has enabled us to develop and offer a specialised procedural regime tailored to international commercial disputes, and it has allowed us to draw from the expertise of eminent commercial judges from around the world to strengthen Singapore’s position as a leading centre for international commercial dispute resolution. But even apart from the work of the SICC, the Singapore Courts have engaged actively with our international counterparts through a variety of bilateral and multilateral fora, and we are supported by a dedicated International Relations team led by a former Ambassador from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This internationalisation ultimately strengthens not only our Judiciary, as we gain the benefit of the rich perspectives of other jurisdictions in navigating the issues that we all face in common; it also strengthens Singapore’s position as a centre for legal services, by providing us with yet more opportunities to put Singapore on the map. One example of this is the collaboration we have entered into with the Kingdom of Bahrain, by means of a Government-to-Government treaty, to help them set up an international commercial court for the Middle East. We have undertaken to allow appeals from that court to come to Singapore, so that there will be a common framework and method for resolving these kinds of disputes.
21. This overview of the efforts that the Singapore Courts have undertaken in these five areas is not an exhaustive account of the responses we have adopted to the challenges I outlined earlier. My aim has just been to offer a flavour of the steps we have taken to meet the needs of those we serve and to strengthen the institution of the Judiciary in these times of change. And our responses to these challenges ultimately are, and must continue to be, the product of the collective efforts of all who are part of the Singapore Courts – not only the leaders of the organisation, and not only specific departments or divisions.
IV. Managing change and transformation
22. That brings me to the final part of my address, which is to share a few thoughts on how change and transformation should be managed within an organisation. I suggest that there are at least two key aims in this regard.
23. The first is developing a sense of shared mission and purpose. We should be very clear about why we are pursuing change, and why we are pursuing change in particular forms, to ensure that changes are not being pursued for their own sake. These rationales for change should then be communicated to all parts and all levels of the organisation involved, so that they can be understood, internalised and adopted by all who are being called upon to support this mission. In the Judiciary, we have taken opportunities through various platforms to communicate our central mission of securing and sustaining trust in our justice systems; to help everyone involved understand why that is such a worthwhile endeavour; and to highlight how the various aspects of the Judiciary’s work enable us to achieve these goals.33
24. The second key aim is to foster a culture of leadership throughout the organisation. Every member of the organisation – in our case, whether he or she is a judge, a judicial officer or a court administrator – must be encouraged to see himself or herself as a judicial leader in his or her own right and should be equipped with the skills and the resolve to continually pursue enhancement, improvement and reform. Leadership is not a particular incident of a managerial position or office, but rather a desire to take action, which everyone in the organisation should be encouraged to develop. Leadership, in this sense, requires vision – which at its core means being able to step back from one’s immediate work and portfolios to take a system-wide view of processes and operations, and to identify gaps and areas for improvement that might otherwise go unnoticed. Leadership requires initiative in recognising problems, thinking about how they might be solved, and marshalling the relevant people and resources to effect change. And finally, it requires courage and commitment – not just to take leaps of faith in departing from settled practices where there is good reason to do so, but also to stay the course in the face of indifference or even resistance.34
25. Let me give you an example. When we have trials involving vulnerable witnesses, such as children or victims of sexual offences, we try to shield them from the accused person to protect them. It used to be the case that we would manually install screens using paper or cardboard. When the time came for us to build our new criminal courtrooms, officers from our Infrastructure directorate drew inspiration from the fact that our LRT trains are installed with switchable glass windows that became opaque when the train passed homes in our HDB estates. They suggested that the same technology be adapted for use as a screening measure in our courtrooms, and that is what we do today. To me, that is leadership – seeing the problem, thinking about how you can make a difference, and then making it happen. This kind of culture will not only make the organisation as a whole more responsive to new challenges and needs, but also strengthen its ability to generate and implement solutions.
V. Conclusion
26. Let me close by returning to a theme I touched on at the beginning of my address: that is, the seeming tension between change and stability. I said that it would be critical for our institutions to be responsive and forward-looking in adapting to change, whilst providing stability and direction in a world that is itself characterised by change. That can look difficult. But as we take steps towards change, it is all the more important that we reflect on, and hold fast to, what must remain constant. For us in the Judiciary, that is an unwavering commitment to being guided by the mission of preserving and strengthening the rule of law.35 That, in all its different manifestations and forms, is what must drive us.
27. Thank you for inviting me to speak to you; it has been a real pleasure. Thank you very much.
* I am deeply grateful to my colleagues, Assistant Registrars Wee Yen Jean and Bryan Ching, for all their assistance in the research for and preparation of this address.
1 See Jennifer Kavanagh & Michael D Rich, RAND Corporation, “Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life”: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html. See also Sundaresh Menon CJ, “After the Fall of Babel: The Courts in a Post-Truth World”, address at the Supreme and Federal Courts’ Judges Conference 2023 (23 January 2023); and Sundaresh Menon CJ, “The Role of the Courts in Our Society – Safeguarding Society”, opening address at the Singapore Courts’ Conversations with the Community (21 September 2023) (“Role of the Courts”) at paras 33–34.
2 See Role of the Courts at para 35; and the Edelman Trust Barometers for 2024, 2023 and 2022.
1 See Jennifer Kavanagh & Michael D Rich, RAND Corporation, “Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life”: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html. See also Sundaresh Menon CJ, “After the Fall of Babel: The Courts in a Post-Truth World”, address at the Supreme and Federal Courts’ Judges Conference 2023 (23 January 2023); and Sundaresh Menon CJ, “The Role of the Courts in Our Society – Safeguarding Society”, opening address at the Singapore Courts’ Conversations with the Community (21 September 2023) (“Role of the Courts”) at paras 33–34.
2 See Role of the Courts at para 35; and the Edelman Trust Barometers for 2024, 2023 and 2022.
3 See Sundaresh Menon CJ, “Judicial Excellence in a Challenging World: The Centrality of Trust”, keynote address at the International Association for Court Administration Conference 2024 (12 November 2024) (“Judicial Excellence in a Challenging World”) at para 8.
4 See Bernard Marr, “A Short History of ChatGPT: How We Got To Where We Are Today”, Forbes (19 May 2023): https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2023/05/19/a-short-history-of-chatgpt-how-we-got-to-where-we-are-today/?sh=3104647e674f.
5 See OpenAI, “o3-mini in ChatGPT – FAQ” (accessed on 18 February 2025): https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10491870-o3-mini-in-chatgpt-faq.
6 See BBC, “DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking” (5 February 2025): https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yv5976z9po.
7 See World Justice Project, Measuring the Justice Gap: A People-Centered Assessment of Unmet Justice Needs Around the World (2019) at pp 7–8: https://worldjusticeproject.org/our-work/research-and-data/accessjustice/measuring-justice-gap.
8 See World Justice Project, Grasping the Justice Gap: Opportunities and Challenges for People-Centered Justice Data (2021) at p 5: https://worldjusticeproject.org/our-work/publications/workingpapers/grasping-justice-gap.
9 See World Justice Project, Disparities, Vulnerability, and Harnessing Data for People-Centered Justice: WJP Justice Data Graphical Report II (2023) at pp 6, 19–22 and 41–45: https://worldjusticeproject.org/our-work/research-anddata/wjp-justice-data-graphical-report-ii.
10 See Sundaresh Menon CJ, “Reimagining the Rule of Law: A Renewed Conception”, speech at the final session of the Singapore Courts’ Conversations with the Community (20 September 2024) at paras 24–25.
11 See Judicial Excellence in a Challenging World at paras 29–30.
12 See Judicial Excellence in a Challenging World at para 13.
13 See Judicial Excellence in a Challenging World at paras 22–24.
14 These judgments and case summaries are accessible at https://www.judiciary.gov.sg/judgments/judgments-case-summaries.
15 The SG Courts WhatsApp channel had 16,267 followers as at 18 February 2025.
16 See Role of the Courts.
17 See Justice Debbie Ong, “Therapeutic Justice – A Fresh Approach to Family Justice”, speech at the Singapore Courts’ Conversations with the Community (16 November 2023).
18 See Justice Philip Jeyaretnam, “Advancing the Environmental Rule of Law – Roles and Responsibilities of the Community”, speech at the Singapore Courts’ Conversations with the Community (26 July 2024).
19 See the Supreme Court of the Republic of Singapore, Registrar’s Circular No 1 of 2024, “Guide on the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools by Court Users” (23 September 2024), which came into effect on 1 October 2024, and which applies to all matters in the Supreme Court, the State Courts (including the Small Claims Tribunals, the Employment Claims Tribunals and the Community Disputes Resolution Tribunals) and the Family Justice Courts.
20 See Sundaresh Menon CJ, Response at the Opening of the Legal Year 2021 (11 January 2021) at para 24: although pandemic restrictions resulted in the vacation of many hearings and the loss of many hearing days across the Singapore Courts, by January 2021, almost all the cases that were held back by these restrictions had either been fixed for hearing or had been substantively disposed of.
21 See Supreme Court of the Republic of Singapore, Registrar’s Circular No 3 of 2020, “Information on Measures and Other Matters Relating to COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) For Court Users and Visitors to the Supreme Court” (27 March 2020).
22 See Judicial Excellence in a Challenging World at para 31.
23 See Sundaresh Menon CJ, Foreword, Accessible, Affordable, Empowering: 40 Years of the Small Claims Tribunals in Singapore (40th Anniversary Commemorative Edition, 2025) (forthcoming) at para 2.
24 See Singapore Courts, Annual Report 2023: “Strengthening Justice, Safeguarding Society” (4 November 2024) at p 33: 9,113 cases were filed in the Small Claims Tribunals in 2022, while 10,288 cases were filed in 2023.
25 See Justice Aidan Xu @ Aedit Abdullah, “Technology as a Bridge to Justice”, speech at the Singapore Courts’ Conversations with the Community (30 May 2024) at para 32.
26 See Judicial Excellence in a Challenging World at para 31.
27 The beta version of the Digital Guided Questionnaire is accessible at https://www.judiciary.gov.sg/digitalconcierge.
28 Accessible at https://www.judiciary.gov.sg/attending-court/guide-to-attending-court.
29 Accessible at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbSHn0tfNw_szqZXwUzszePvihihWQYi9.
30 See Singapore Judicial College, Annual Report 2019 at p 2 (Message from the Chief Justice).
31 See Sundaresh Menon CJ, Response at the Opening of the Legal Year 2025 (13 January 2025) at para 37(c).
32 See Judicial Excellence in a Challenging World at para 13.
33 See, for example, Judicial Excellence in a Challenging World at paras 2 and 32–33; and Role of the Courts at paras 29–44.
34 See Judicial Excellence in a Challenging World at para 27; and Sundaresh Menon CJ, “Securing Trust: The Project of Judicial Leadership”, welcome address at the opening of the Court Week of the Judicial Executive Programme (21 November 2022) at paras 15–24.
35 See Sundaresh Menon CJ, “Judicial Responsibility in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”, keynote speech at the inaugural Singapore-India Conference on Technology (13 April 2024) at paras 5 and 32.
2025/03/10
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