Robert Beckman is an Emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Law of the National University of Singapore (NUS). He has been with NUS for more than 40 years, and has taught various courses in public international law. He has specialized in Ocean Law and Policy and in the International Regulation of Shipping, and he currently teaches a course on International Regulation of the Global Commons. Prof Beckman was the founding Director of the Centre for International Law (CIL), a university-level research institute at NUS, and he is currently the head of CIL’s Ocean Law & Policy Programme. He is also a Senior Advisor to the Maritime Security Programme of the Institute for Defence & Strategic Studies (IDSS) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Prof Beckman is a member of the Governing Board of the Rhodes Academy of Oceans Law and Policy. He has a special interest in ocean law and policy issues in Southeast Asia, including the maritime disputes in the South China Sea. In 2020 Prof Beckman was nominated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Vietnam to the List of Arbitrators under Annex VII of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Professor Beckman did his first degree and JD degree at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his LLM at Harvard Law School.