Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon: 20th Conference of The Chief Justices of Asia and the Pacific

20TH CONFERENCE OF THE CHIEF JUSTICES OF ASIA AND THE PACIFIC 

"The Learning Judge: Judicial Education and the Modern Judiciary"

17 September 2026

The Honourable the Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon

Supreme Court of Singapore

1. In most common law systems, judicial education was once regarded as unnecessary or even inappropriate because judges were generally appointed from the ranks of senior advocates, and distinction at the Bar was thought to equip them sufficiently for judicial office. That premise no longer holds true, if indeed it ever did. To begin with, the transition from advocate to judge entails a fundamental change in function, perspective and responsibility. But even more fundamentally, no judge, however experienced at appointment, can expect to remain fully equipped to meet the demands  of a judicial career that may span several decades.

2. My central proposition is simple: dedicated judicial education must now be regarded as essential for a modern judiciary. Beyond enhancing the competence of individual judges, the commitment to continuing education enables the judiciary as an institution to adapt to change and so to sustain the public confidence on which its authority and legitimacy depend.

II. The Modern Operating Environment

3. Let me begin by restating the case for judicial education which, I suggest has become more urgent because of three features of the modern operating environment: the growing complexity of disputes; the accelerating pace of change, especially in technology; and the phenomenon of declining trust in public institutions.⁽¹⁾

A. Escalating complexity

4. Courts increasingly determine disputes in which knowledge of the law alone is not enough. Scientific and technical knowledge may be central to identifying the facts, evaluating expert evidence and applying established principles coherently. In a technically complex patent appeal, for example, the Singapore Court of Appeal directed counsel to prepare a 50-page primer and convened a technology tutorial over three half-days which proved extremely valuable in helping us come to grips with the technical issues needed to resolve the legal questions in the case.⁽²⁾ Of course, judges need not become scientists or engineers. But they will need sufficient literacy in adjacent fields to ask the right questions, engage critically with expert evidence and recognise the limits of their own understanding.⁽³⁾

B. The accelerating pace of change

5. The second feature is the pace at which knowledge and technology are changing. The challenge is not simply that change occurs, but how quickly it is occurring. Knowledge and skills can no longer be treated as fixed assets acquired at appointment. They require continuing renewal throughout the course of a long career.⁽⁴⁾

6. Generative AI provides a striking example.⁽⁵⁾ When ChatGPT was released publicly in November 2022, it was principally a conversational text model. Less than four years later, frontier systems can operate as agents capable of pursuing multi-step objectives and interacting with external systems. Just last month, Britain’s AI Security Institute reported that agents powered by OpenAI and Anthropic models had taken unauthorised actions during controlled cybersecurity evaluations. In the most serious case, an agent wrote malicious code and created false online identities in an attempt to induce a human to approve it.⁽⁶⁾ The pace and unpredictability of these developments illustrate how quickly the technological context in which courts operate can change.

7. In such an environment, judges just cannot afford to stop learning. As scientific knowledge expands, commercial practices evolve, new forms of evidence emerge and transactions become more transnational, no judge can rely indefinitely on the knowledge and experience brought to the Bench. A judge who does not continue to learn may struggle to understand the factual setting of a dispute, test expert evidence or recognise the limits of familiar legal analogies. Judges must therefore be able to recognise the limits of their knowledge, acquire unfamiliar knowledge quickly and revise their thinking when new knowledge requires it. 

C. Declining trust

8. The third feature is declining trust in public institutions. Courts operate in an environment that is frequently rife with polarisation and misinformation so much so that citizens may disagree even about basic facts. In such an environment, how do we secure public confidence that judges are competent, independent and impartial, and that they decide disputes in good faith and according to law?⁽⁷⁾

9. Judicial education cannot, by itself, reverse wider social distrust. But it can help create and sustain the conditions in which judicial legitimacy is won, by enabling judges to manage the complexity that features in the cases that come before them; to communicate clearly to all who are affected by their judgments; to conduct proceedings with fairness and dignity; and to contribute effectively to reforms that improve the administration of justice. Judges are shared custodians of the justice system, and how they discharge that responsibility can strengthen or diminish the trust on which its legitimacy depends.⁽⁸⁾

III. From Judicial Training to the Learning Judge

10. Taken together, these challenges require judicial education to move, as my colleagues at the Singapore Judicial College have put it, beyond teaching, beyond adjudication and beyond law.⁽⁹⁾ Let me explain.

11. First, it must go beyond teaching to self-directed learning. Teaching is the periodic transmission of content. But the accelerating pace of change means that no curriculum can equip a judge once and for all. The aim must therefore be to foster self-directed, career-long learning: the ability to recognise a gap in one’s knowledge, identify reliable sources of information to plug that gap and then to adapt one’s practices where appropriate.⁽¹⁰⁾

12. Second, judicial education must go beyond adjudication to managing and enhancing the justice system. Of course, adjudication remains the judge’s primary responsibility; but judicial office also carries responsibility for the fair and efficient administration of justice. Judges must therefore be equipped to lead, mentor, reform systems and to figure out how to improve the way justice is delivered.⁽¹¹⁾

13. Third, judicial education must go beyond law into related fields. Complex disputes will surely require deep legal knowledge, but they may also require sufficient literacy in fields such as technology, statistics, forensics, psychology and even public policy. The aim is simply to enable judges to understand how these fields bear on judicial work, to engage specialists critically and to know when further assistance from technical experts is needed.⁽¹²⁾

14. This led us to develop the idea of the “Learning Judge”: meaning a judge who treats continuing development through the active pursuit of learning as an integral part of judicial office. Becoming a Learning Judge requires both individual commitment and institutional support. Judges must take ownership of their development, while judicial education institutions must provide the structure, resources and opportunities that will be needed to sustain it.⁽¹³⁾

IV. Putting the Learning Judge into Practice: Lessons from Singapore

15. The first decade of the Singapore Judicial College, or SJC, illustrates how this shared responsibility can be translated into practice. 

A. Going beyond teaching: structured, career-long and active learning

16. To move beyond ad hoc or episodic teaching, the SJC organises judicial education around a coherent account of the competencies that judges may require at different stages of their careers. The College developed a Judicial Competency Framework that provides that structure. The Framework identifies 14 competencies, including legal knowledge, decision-making, ethics, communication, judicial temperament, leadership, collaboration, reform and innovation, learning and adaptation, resilience, and competence in related fields.⁽¹⁴⁾ For each competency, the Framework sets out the knowledge, skills and attributes expected at the foundational, intermediate and advanced levels of a judicial career. The SJC designs, maps and reviews its curriculum by reference to the Framework, providing structured and progressive development across these competencies and levels.⁽¹⁵⁾  The Framework also enables judges to assess their own development, identify gaps and then pursue learning suited to their responsibilities and career stage. It thus gives practical effect to a simple idea: career-long learning should be institution-supported, but individual-driven.

B. Going beyond adjudication: developing systemic competence

17. The competency-based approach also gives practical effect to the ideal of going beyond adjudication. Leadership, collaboration, and reform and innovation sit alongside traditional adjudicative competencies because judges may be called upon to lead court divisions, mentor colleagues, design procedures and oversee institutional change. These are not peripheral functions. The quality of adjudication also depends on the fairness and effectiveness of the wider system. The SJC therefore seeks to deepen its “systemic justice training” in management, leadership and organisational transformation. 

C. Going beyond law: a T-shaped curriculum

18. And the SJC responds to increasing complexity through what it calls a “T-shaped” curriculum: this contemplates depth in core legal and adjudicative competencies, but combined with breadth across allied and emerging fields. Programmes in judgment writing, courtroom communication, evidence, ethics and case management sit alongside learning in technology, digital forensics, psychology and statistics. Some programmes deliberately bring these dimensions together. Training on the handling of sexual offence cases, for example, covers not only the applicable legal principles, but also relevant aspects of psychology and trauma. This helps judges appreciate the wider context in which such cases arise and how non-legal considerations may bear on judicial work. The breadth of the curriculum is designed to help our judges recognise when knowledge from other disciplines matters, and to engage specialists intelligently, recognising the limits of their own expertise.⁽¹⁶⁾

D. The judicial college as a learning institution

19. I would like to round up my remarks with some observations on the SJC. An institution that seeks to produce Learning Judges must itself be a learning institution. Its curriculum must be reviewed and revised as judicial work and educational needs evolve. The SJC does this at one level through annual consultations with court leaders and reviews by judge-led Subject Matter Advisory Panels, and at a more granular level through feedback and evaluations of each programme after delivery, focusing on learner engagement and whether the intended outcomes were achieved. Feedback is then used to improve existing programmes and identify priorities for new ones. Constant review is therefore part of the educational process itself.⁽¹⁷⁾

E. International collaboration and communities of learning

20. Finally, the Learning Judge should be part of a wider community of judicial learning. Modern judiciaries face many common challenges but encounter them through different legal traditions and institutional settings. That diversity makes comparative engagement especially valuable. In line with this, the SJC closely studied the pedagogical approaches of leading international judicial training institutes, including France’s École Nationale de la Magistrature and Canada’s National Judicial Institute, before adapting lessons from these models to Singapore’s context.⁽¹⁸⁾

21. The SJC has also formalised relationships with several judicial education institutions through memoranda of understanding and maintains a network of roundtables, knowledge exchanges and joint programmes. Together, these relationships create an international community in which judges and judicial educators can exchange ideas, practices and perspectives, and learn with and from one another.⁽¹⁹⁾

V. Conclusion

22. Let me conclude by reiterating that judicial education is fundamental to the effective functioning of a modern judiciary. It enables a judiciary to maintain competence, adapt to change and sustain public confidence. The modern judge must be able to adjudicate well, but also to understand unfamiliar domains, and contribute to institutional leadership and reform, communicate effectively, and continually renew his or her capabilities. In an environment of rapid and dramatic change, continuing judicial education is simply indispensable if judges are to discharge their core responsibilities effectively.