Benjamin Lawrence 

Postdoctoral Fellow, National University of Singapore

Discipline: Cambodian Constitutional Law, Buddhism, Legal Rights
Regional Focus: Southeast Asia

Biography:
Now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS), National University of Singapore (NUS), Ben was awarded his Ph.D. in Law & Society by the University of Victoria (Canada) in July 2020. His dissertation, titled ‘Cambodia’s Competing Constitutional Sites and Spirits,’ sought to highlight the manifold ways in which constitutional ideas and practices are manifested outside of judicial institutions in Cambodia by applying ethnographic approaches to the study of constitutionalism. More generally, his work sits at a confluence of streams of comparative constitutionalism, socio-legal studies, and the anthropology of law, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. During his doctoral studies, he was a QEII Diamond Jubilee Scholar at the Centre for Asia Pacific Initiatives (Victoria), a Study Abroad Scholar with the Leverhulme Trust (UK), and a Visiting Fellow at the Cambodian Development Resource Institute, as well as teaching comparative politics at the University of Zaman (Phnom Penh). Ben received an M.A. in International and Comparative Legal Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) in 2012, and a B.A. in History and Politics from the University of Leicester in 2008.