Principal District Judge Thian Yee Sze interviewing the late Mr Howard Cashin in 2009
Our oral history project
From 2005, the Singapore Academy of Law began a systematic collection of memories and knowledge of Singapore’s legal history through recorded interviews with members of the legal profession and selected narrators who are familiar with key legal personalities. This project is carried out in partnership with the Oral History Centre (OHC) of the National Archives of Singapore.
Together with earlier work done by the OHC, hundreds of hours of oral history interviews have been recorded with more than 50 personalities across the strata of the legal community and the list continues to grow. These audio recordings, transcripts and synopsis of the interviews preserved for posterity are available to researchers from the NAS portal.
Over the years, we have also evolved from being a collector and depository of oral history recordings. As part of our efforts to create greater awareness and legal history, we have taken excerpts from these rich eye-witness accounts and shared them on our online blog as well as publications under Academy Publishing heritage series.
Our oral history programme focuses on two major themes:
