Scholars in Conversation: Stanley Yeo with Nikita Ahalyan

The ‘Scholars in Conversation’ series features interviews with academics across diverse disciplines and geographies. Anchored by faculty members of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, these conversations explore the work of leading voices in their fields in order to bring academic insights to bear on public discourse.

Professor Stanley Yeo joined the National University of Singapore Faculty in late 2006 from Southern Cross University, Australia, where he was Head of the School of Law and Justice. His main teaching and research interests lie in the area of criminal law, especially comparative criminal law. During his academic career spanning over 40 years, Professor Yeo has taught in Australia, Bhutan, Canada, India, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. He has published extensively in the fields of criminal law and criminal justice and has been a consultant to various law reform commissions in many jurisdictions. He is a recipient of awards for excellence in teaching in Australia and Singapore.

Professor Yeo visited NLSIU to conduct a two-day Faculty Development Workshop on ‘Teaching Criminal Law: Curriculum, Syllabus and Pedagogy’ on 15 and 16 November 2025. Prior to the workshop, on 13 November, he shared his academic journey with the faculty and research community through a presentation titled ‘Conjuring Criminal Law on the Good Ship “The IPC”’. On 14 November 2025, he delivered a lecture to NLSIU students on ‘Influences on Criminal Law and its Reform in Asia’. The three generous lectures he shared on campus demonstrated his commitment to producing scholarship that is accessible, especially to judges and legislators, and is reform-oriented.

Nikita Ahalyan, Assistant Professor at NLSIU and Co-Director of the Centre for Child and the Law, sat down with Professor Yeo  to discuss criminal law, research, and his experience working with diverse stakeholders within the criminal justice system. Responding to a range of questions on criminal law reform, comparative law, and the shortcomings in modernising the Penal Code, Professor Yeo spoke of why the recent reforms to the Code were better-formed in Singapore than in India; the importance of participation of judges and legislators in law reform and of making law accessible to citizens; and the need to both modernise law to respond to contemporary crimes and also continue to develop established principles of criminal law, which are often overlooked.

Professor Yeo, you have worked across a range of jurisdictions in the Global South—Singapore, Malaysia, Bhutan, and now Laos. Currently, you are working on a commentary on the Indian Penal Code (IPC). How has moving across various systems shaped your sense of what is universal in criminal law?

I will be focusing on the IPC for most of this conversation, since it has been much of my life’s work. As to what is universal in criminal law, I have found it in the general principles of criminal responsibility—comprising the fault and physical elements of crime, general defences, extensions of criminal liability, inchoate offences, and so on. These principles are found in common law and civil law jurisdictions, with some divergences and contingencies. By and large, however, my research has shown that these principles bear a very close similarity across the various legal systems.

Is that why you argue for having a chapter on these general principles in a criminal code?

Indeed, the reason being that the general principles of criminal responsibility comprise the core of criminal law. Placing these principles in a chapter of their own in a criminal code not only highlights their importance, but provides ready access to them. Unfortunately, the IPC does not have such a chapter, unlike many of the more recent criminal codes. The drafters of the recent Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) could have introduced one but failed to do so.

Going beyond the question, much of the current criminal law literature and discourses have to do with special laws on matters such as corruption, cyber law, terrorism, and sedition. By contrast, scholarship on the general principles of criminal responsibility has not developed nearly as much. In my view, it is incorrect to contend that these general principles are ‘a given’ and don’t require further thinking, arguments, or research. To the contrary, there remains much to be thought about and done with respect to these principles.

Special criminal laws also have to engage with debates about the general principles of criminal responsibility such as intention, knowledge, causation, and so on. Too often, when discussing these special laws, academics, legislators, judges, and other stakeholders lose sight of the fact that the penal codes, as the main repository of criminal law, deal with intention, knowledge, causation, etc. Rather than relying on these Code-formulated principles, there is a tendency for the special laws to devise their own formulations. This creates unnecessary problems and complications.

Do you think comparative criminal law can play a constructive role in criminal law reform? What is your approach to studying the law of another jurisdiction?

I believe that comparatism is an extremely valuable tool for reforming not only criminal law but all areas of law. Consider this simple analogy—I like eating fish. I can fish in my local pond. I can fish in the river. I can fish in the ocean. If I fish in the bigger world, I get to eat more types of fish. It is the same thing with law. What is law? In any form, law is basically a human construct to solve social conflicts. It is present in all human societies, where people come together and interact. Many of the social problems that a country has are shared by other countries. These countries have devised legal solutions to these problems, which warrant careful study.

As for my approach to studying the law of another jurisdiction, let me start off with my study of the IPC and how, over the years, I have gradually built up a way of answering questions specific to criminal law reform in a new jurisdiction. As an anchor to my research, I rely on my knowledge and expertise in the IPC. On that firm grounding, I venture out and look at some aspect of the criminal law of a new jurisdiction. When doing so, it is vitally important for me to come with an open mind and not to fall into the trap of thinking that the law that I have expertise in is superior to that of the new jurisdiction being studied. My approach should therefore be: ‘Let me be unbiased and try and see how this particular jurisdiction deals with this common social problem. How does IPC deal with it? Which solution is preferable and why?’

In your recent book on the Lao Penal Code, you compare the law of Laos with another civil law jurisdiction, France. While making suggestions for reform, how conscious are you of the characteristics—social, cultural, political, etc—of the countries you are comparing?

As a comparativist, I come from a position of ignorance. One extreme position that some comparativists take is that one cannot comment on a foreign legal system without first having a thorough understanding of the substantive law, procedural law, justice system, social context, and language of that system. Some comparativists spend years studying these aspects before venturing into their comparative legal work. At the opposite end, there are comparatists who contend that such prior understanding isn’t a prerequisite to engaging in comparative legal study.

I take a middle approach, believing there are cultural and social nuances that a foreigner might be unable to identify without assistance. As such, I approach the legal study of a new jurisdiction with a respectful position of ignorance. At the same time, I feel I have valuable insights to share from my expertise in the law of my own jurisdiction.

Wherever possible, I engage in collaborative work with an expert of the foreign legal system. For example, for my Lao book project, I made sure that we had on our team of researchers a Lao legal academic as well as a French-trained lawyer based in Laos.

Furthermore, rather than paying just a very brief visit to a new jurisdiction to obtain materials and speak to a few people, I try to spend a few weeks if not months in that country. This enables me to understand the place a little more and to get to know my local contacts better. As a result, my project becomes more engaging, productive, and enjoyable.

As part of your Bhutan project, you conducted interviews and workshops involving judges and legal practitioners. You have also worked with law reform commissions. What do you think makes academic work persuasive to legislators and the judiciary?

In the law, not just criminal law, ideas of how the law should progress to serve the community involve three players: legislators who make the law, judges who interpret and dispense the law, and academics.

Academics have a very important role to play in legal development—they are more than so-called residents of ‘ivory towers’. Our job is to carefully consider and critique the actions of legislators and judges, and we have the training, time, and resources for this vital work.

It is my sad belief that most legislators are primarily interested in winning elections. Criminal law remains a low priority subject for them, unless it involves some event attracting considerable public attention, such as a corruption allegation or a high-profile sexual offence case. Even then, their idea of improving the law is often confined to merely enhancing punishment, as opposed to serious revisions to the substantive criminal law itself.

As for judges, while they may be learned in the law, they have very limited time to undertake their own research or reflect about the law. They tend to rely heavily on the submissions of legal counsel appearing before them, who, like the judges, have very little time for reflection and research.

It is therefore the academics who serve an important role here. However, for the law to progress, the legislators and judges must acknowledge the important role of academics in this three-player dynamic. If you have an open-minded legislator who is serious about reform, they will definitely engage academics and consult them. The same can be said of open-minded judges as they will rely on and cite academic literature in their judgments.

In my view, and with due respect, the recent criminal law reform project in India resulting in the BNS was done rather haphazardly and, coloured by the rhetoric of nationalism and de-colonisation, failed to achieve much needed substantive reform of the IPC.

This stands in contrast to the Singapore legislature, which recently undertook a serious law reform exercise of the nation’s Penal Code. It commissioned a Penal Code Review Committee comprising senior government lawyers, judges, members of the criminal bar, and several legal academics, including me. As a result, the committee’s recommendations, most of which were eventually enacted by the legislature, were substantial improvements to the Penal Code. In particular, they brought much needed clarity and certainty to many of the general principles of criminal responsibility contained in the Penal Code.

Turning to judges, it does not appear to be part of the Indian judicial culture to rely on and cite academic literature on the criminal law. More glaringly, there is scant appreciation by Indian judges of the wealth of case authorities from other IPC jurisdictions, which could assist with their decision-making.

By contrast, Singaporean judges have a long-standing tradition of referring to cases from other IPC jurisdictions, not least from India. There is also a trend in the past two decades of Singaporean judges relying on and citing academic literature in their judgments.

This welcome and important judicial practice of referring to academic literature is also evident in many of the other jurisdictions that I have studied, such as Australia, Canada, and the UK. Speaking of Australia, I recall the Honourable Michael Kirby, then Justice of the High Court of Australia, writing a letter to a young law lecturer at the law school I taught in, acknowledging that a case note she had written had assisted him in a judgment he wrote and thanking her for her work. This is a heart-warming instance of mentoring from on high and from a distance and without regard whatsoever for status. The result is the strong promotion of collaboration between judges and academics for the betterment of the law and society.

You have led a team of criminal law experts which have produced the LexisNexis criminal law series of jurisdictions based on the IPC, for example, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, with India and Bangladesh soon to follow. Is there a particular approach that you have taken for this successful venture?

Each book in the series follows a well-worn and tested structure. Most chapters commence with a historical and theoretical perspective of the topic covered by the chapter. This makes the authors keenly aware of the origin and underlying rationales of the law they are writing about. The chapters then proceed to describe and critically evaluate the substantive provisions and judicial pronouncements on the topic. Wherever possible, the authors refer to legislative developments and case law from other IPC jurisdictions and, where these are not forthcoming, to selected sources from other common law jurisdictions such as Australia, Canada, and the UK. The authors’ recognition of the value of comparative legal study is evident here. Each chapter then concludes with suggestions for reforming the law stemming from the preceding discussion.

This structure lends itself well to studying the law in a comprehensive and organised way, offering reasons why certain areas of the law can remain because they have been shown to be working well or clear. For those areas where the law has been shown by the discussion to be ambiguous or there are gaps, that is where reform is needed. The analytical discussion conducted by the authors place them in a strong position to draft provisions to remedy these deficiencies.

As you had mentioned earlier, you have been a member of a commission that sought to rationalise, recalibrate, and modernise a penal code. What does modernising look like in the context of criminal law? Is it just about language, structure, or underlying moral or penal philosophies?

Drawing on my recent experience of Singapore law reform, it involves all three. For anyone interested in learning more about this initiative, they can look up the Singapore Penal Code Review Committee Report 2018.

Modernising would include replacing outmoded terms, updating illustrations, and fine-tuning them to more current scenarios. Modernisation would also involve introducing newer forms of offences like digital offences, modern forms of corruption, etc. It also involves addressing the issue of gender imbalance and making the law more neutral.

The recent Singaporean review and reform of its Penal Code has resulted in most of the general principles of criminal responsibility being clearly enacted in the Code. Consequently, there is no longer a need to rely on judicial pronouncements on these principles, as was the case prior to this legislative reform effort. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of India’s BNS as it achieved not much more than the introduction of some new offences, an increase in some penalties, with hardly any revisions to the all-important general principles.

At this juncture, we should be reminded of the goals of codification set out by the framers of the IPC. They included the need for comprehensiveness and precision of the criminal law and for the law to be readily comprehensible and accessible to lay people, without having to rely on lawyers to interpret the law. To help achieve these goals, the IPC framers devised a unique form of legislative drafting comprising precisely crafted provisions, with explanations where needed, and accompanied by illustrations. In spite of this structure, the IPC framers accepted the fallibility of their work and acknowledged that periodic legislative reform was required to rectify a defect in a provision brought to light. They proposed setting up a mechanism for this. Basically, if the issue came before a higher court, and there was a dissenting judgment, the problematic provision would be sent back to Parliament, which had to revise it within a specified period. Unfortunately, this proposal was never adopted by the Indian legislature or those of other IPC jurisdictions.

As matters now stand, in the aftermath of the review by Singapore legislature, one can expect that nation’s Penal Code to be better understood by its citizens. The same cannot be said for India’s BNS, which continues to require lawyers to understand it and, even then, only with the help of voluminous commentaries.

As criminal law evolves to address new forms of harm like digital offences and AI-driven conduct, do you think our traditional concepts of intention and responsibility are sufficient? Or are we moving towards an entirely new way of thinking about culpability in this century?

I recall that twenty plus years ago, a similar question arose in relation to the issue of corporate homicide, which complicated our traditional premise of criminal responsibility being confined to the individual human being. Criminal law was not entirely equipped to address such a problem—the Bhopal disaster comes to mind. While we had penalties for occupational health and safety, such as fines, this did not extend to imprisonment. Consequently, some jurisdictions created novel and special laws that defined concepts like intention and knowledge in such a way as to account for the corporate entity. I anticipate a similar development will occur to combat new forms of harm such as those you have mentioned.

That said, I believe that the basic elements of crime such as the fault and physical elements of criminal responsibility will still have an important role to play but would need to be modified to deal with these new forms of harm. In my view, there are many concepts that are embedded in the general principles that constitute flexible and helpful tools to meet these new developments, for example the concepts of ‘reasonableness’, ‘foresight’, and ‘mistake’. While special legislation may be required, the solutions to these emerging new forms of harm will nonetheless flow from or be strongly influenced by the traditional general principles of criminal responsibility.

You have taught and mentored generations of criminal law scholars across various continents. How do you encourage students to confront the human and ethical dimensions of crime and punishment?

To begin, the way I teach criminal law is very often a symbiosis between my teaching and my research, the latter of which invariably involves some human and ethical dimension of crime and punishment. I’ve always endeavoured to bring them together.

Teaching criminal law is confined to a limited number of contact hours. Given this limitation, I am quite selective about the topics I cover and try to avoid repetition. When considering a new topic, I ask myself, how might it contribute to the student’s learning experience? What new thing can I teach the students that I have not taught in the other topics that form part of my syllabus? Generally, I try to make learning interesting and useful to my students by situating the law within its larger social context.

For example, rather than merely going through the provisions on private defence, I discuss them within the realm of domestic violence. Take the case of a wife suffering from so-called ‘battered woman syndrome’ and has killed her husband while he is asleep. I ask my students to consider whether they thought the woman’s killing was a reasonable response in self-defence. In so doing, I engage my students with the idea of gendering the law of private defence in terms of male aggression towards another male. Can the experience of a female aggressor fit within such a legal framework? Also, why does the criminal law medicalise such a woman by labelling her as suffering from a ‘syndrome’? These types of questions help to open the students’ minds to the human and ethical dimensions of the law in its pursuit of criminal justice. This form of teaching method gives me much satisfaction, and I believe my students enjoy it too.

While on the subject of teaching, one of the things I have often told my students is that it is just me alone compared to a whole class of fresh young minds studying a particular area of the law. Accordingly, this opens up the possibility of my learning from them as much as they are learning from me. It is therefore a two-way learning process. Over the years, I have had occasion to revise my views on a number of legal issues based on fresh insights from my students.

Across your career, what has your journey taught you about human behaviour in the domain of criminal law and criminal justice?

Rather than commenting on the behaviour of offenders and victims as your question alludes to, I would like instead to comment on the behaviour of members of our legislature. This is because, in my view, therein lies an immense problem hampering the improvement of criminal law and criminal justice.

Generally, legislators have been extremely slow to engage with issues requiring reform of the criminal law. Many of the law’s defects are so glaring and in dire need of attention. Yet, the legislators lack interest or the political will to rectify these defects. Sadly, so long as such a lackadaisical attitude continues, the basic nuts and bolts of criminal law will not be transformed to meet the needs and demands of the 21st century, resulting in injustice. The image that comes to mind is of a person charged with responsibility for the upkeep of a car, but who allows it to fall into disrepair, thereby endangering the lives of the people using the car and other road users.

Is there a concern that continues to animate your scholarship—something unresolved that continues to challenge or inspire you?

The thing that continues to challenge me is how to persuade the lawmakers, be they the legislators or judges, to be actively engaged with serious and much needed reform of the criminal law.

To give an example, my criminal law research team recently produced a commentary on the Bhutan Penal Code, which gave many recommendations for improving the Code. Several Bhutanese legislators attended a workshop we conducted about our commentary. One of them shared that many legislators keep quiet about criminal law concerns because they lack legal training or knowledge. On hearing this, our team expressed our willingness to explain the law and our reform proposals to the legislators, as we were very keen to see Bhutan’s criminal law progress.

With regard to India, having written extensively about the IPC over the length of my forty-year academic career, I would have dearly loved, had I been invited, to serve on the BNS-IPC reform committee. This was the case for the Singapore Penal Code review exercise and also for the Irish and UK Law Commissions, which had invited me to present consultation papers on the IPC pertaining to culpable homicide and selected defences.

To conclude, as an academic, it is within my power to do my very best when conducting my scholarly work. The challenge is whether I can bring the legislators and also the judges to join me in improving the criminal law. While I can try to persuade them and offer my services, their participation is beyond my control. As mentioned earlier on in this conversation, for the criminal law to improve, the three players—legislators, judges, and academics—each have a vital and collaborative role to play. It is my earnest hope that, in time, this collaboration will materialise in India.

The transcription of this interview was assisted by Jyotika Tomar, a second-year LLB (Hons) student at NLSIU and Rohan Mehta, a fourth-year BA LLB (Hons) student at NLSIU.