Dr Alan Tan is Professor of Aviation Law at the NUS Law School. Born in Penang, Malaysia, Alan was educated at the Penang Free School and Raffles Junior College on an ASEAN Scholarship, subsequently obtaining an LLB from NUS and an LLM and JSD from Yale Law School. He was the winner of the Koh Han Kok Prize for International Law at NUS, and his doctoral thesis on the law and politics of shipping regulation won the Ambrose Gherini International Law Prize at Yale Law School. Alan has clerked for the Supreme Court of Singapore and also interned at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in London. He has published widely on Maritime Law, Aviation Law and Environmental Law, particularly in the context of Asian countries. He is the author of ‘Vessel-Source Marine Pollution: The Law and Politics of International Regulation’, published by Cambridge University Press. In 2006, his article in the Air & Space Law journal— ‘Liberalizing Aviation in the Asia-Pacific Region: The Impact of the E.U. Horizontal Mandate’— won the Diedriks-Verschoor Prize for best law article.
Alan was a Hauser Global Visiting Professor at New York University (NYU) School of Law in 2009, where he taught a course on global aviation law and policy. He has also taught at the University of Sydney and served as consultant to various governments and donor agencies, including the Vietnamese and Sri Lankan governments and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). His work on liberalizing the aviation industry in Asia has resulted in studies for the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). He has also advised airlines such as AirAsia, Royal Brunei and Cebu Pacific.
