From Bar to bench: Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon's career and landmark rulings
Chief Justice Menon, who will retire in February 2027, oversaw landmark rulings that struck at the heart of how the law takes shape in the lives of ordinary people.
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SINGAPORE: Before he became Singapore's fourth Chief Justice, Sundaresh Menon had already built one of the country's most distinguished legal careers. He became a law firm partner at just 27, helped found one of Singapore's largest firms and later served as Attorney-General.
Over the next 14 years as head of the judiciary, he would oversee changes to modernise the courts while presiding over landmark cases on online falsehoods, Section 377A and the death penalty that shaped Singapore's legal landscape.
Chief Justice Menon, 64, will retire on Feb 26, 2027, after more than 14 years at the helm of the Supreme Court. He will be succeeded by Justice of the Court of Appeal Sushil Nair, 62.
A graduate of the National University of Singapore and Harvard Law School, Chief Justice Menon was just 27 when he became a partner in law firm Shook Lin & Bok in 1990.
After helping to found WongPartnership in 1992, he later joined Rajah & Tann, where he became managing partner in 2009.
His rise continued into public service in 2010, when he became Attorney-General. Not long after, in 2012, he was appointed Singapore’s fourth Chief Justice at the age of 50.
Reforming the family justice system was among Chief Justice Menon’s avowed priorities when he took office. His tenure saw the adoption of the therapeutic justice model in the Family Justice Courts, including the Youth Courts.
This moved the resolution of family disputes and treatment of young offenders from an adversarial paradigm to a problem-solving, rehabilitative approach.
Explaining this philosophy, he likened the family judge to “a doctor with a focus on diagnosing the problem, having the appropriate bedside manner to engender trust and convey empathy, and the wisdom to choose the right course of treatment so as to bring a measure of healing”.
A notable change in this spirit was a simplified track for divorce introduced in 2015, enabling faster, less costly and less acrimonious proceedings.
Under Chief Justice Menon’s watch, the judiciary also took steps to improve access to justice, especially for those navigating the courts without legal representation.
This extended to using simpler terms: an “order to attend court or produce documents” instead of “subpoena”, for instance.
Another initiative was the Singapore Judicial College, launched in 2015 to centralise judicial training, which had until then been managed by individual courts.
The founding of the Singapore International Commercial Court (SICC) can also be traced back to the chief justice, who first proposed the idea in 2013.
The SICC was launched two years later, boosting Singapore’s status as a neutral venue for international commercial dispute resolution.
He also steered the courts through technological changes such as remote hearings and online services during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the judiciary's adoption of artificial intelligence tools.
In a May interview with local media, he warned of social media contributing to “truth decay” by allowing anyone with mass reach to propose their own version of the facts.
This, he said, is partly why the judiciary makes sure to give reasons for its decisions and explain them in a way accessible to laypeople.
“I always make the point that you write judgments for a range of audiences, and it’s not the case that you’re writing judgments only to make law and only to speak to lawyers,” he said.
“You’re also writing judgments to speak to the parties, and more importantly, in a sense, you’re writing judgments to speak to your country.”
Former Justice Choo Han Teck said it was a “privilege” to have known Chief Justice Menon in many capacities, from law school to the present.
“Lawyers will remember him for his thoughtfulness and vision, and I will also remember him for his friendship,” the retired judge told CNA.
LANDMARK RULINGS
As a jurist, Chief Justice Menon presided over several landmark cases that struck at the heart of how the law takes shape in the lives of ordinary people.
In 2021, he led a panel of three judges in upholding the constitutionality of the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA).
He disagreed with the Attorney-General’s argument that a statement is a falsehood even before the court decides on this, saying it was “untenable” that a statement is false because a minister has identified it to be so.
“The minister may, after all, be mistaken,” he said in the ruling on appeals filed by The Online Citizen and Singapore Democratic Party.
“Truth and falsehood are ultimately matters to be determined by a court based on the evidence.”
In 2022, he led the five-judge panel that upheld the constitutionality of Section 377A, which criminalises sex between men, in a legal challenge brought by three gay men.
The apex court dismissed the challenge because it found that Section 377A was “unenforceable”, unless the Attorney-General signalled a change to its stance of not prosecuting such acts “between two consenting adults in a private place”.
In the judgment, Chief Justice Menon laid out his view on whether politics or litigation can better resolve polarising issues in society.
“The single biggest advantage of the political process – in fact, its raison d’etre – is its ability to accommodate divergent interests and opinions,” he said.
“However sub-optimally some may think politics performs that function, the courts can never discharge that function simply because it is not their constitutional role to mediate such differences in society.
“And this is so for good reason, because litigation is a zero-sum, adversarial process with win-lose outcomes.
“The political process, in contrast, seeks to mediate – it strives for compromises and consensus in which no one side has to lose all.”
Section 377A was repealed by parliament later in 2022, accompanied by a constitutional amendment to protect a heterosexual definition of marriage.
In 2019, Chief Justice Menon led the five-judge panel that dismissed an appeal by drug trafficker Nagaenthran Dharmalingam, who was on death row.
This ruling established the “Nagaenthran test” for determining whether a trafficker was suffering an abnormality of mind that substantially impaired his or her responsibility for the offence.
Passing the test could mean that a convicted drug trafficker who was sentenced to death could be resentenced to life imprisonment instead.
Nagaenthran failed that test in the Court of Appeal, and was executed in 2022.
That same year, Chief Justice Menon was on the bench when another drug trafficker on death row, Roszaidi bin Osman, came before the apex court.
The Court of Appeal reached a rare three-two split decision, with the chief justice joining two fellow judges in overturning the death sentence and handing Roszaidi life imprisonment.
Chief Justice Menon delivered the majority judgment, recounting in granular detail Roszaidi's decades-long struggle with drug abuse, which began at the age of 10, and how his depression and substance use disorder affected his ability to resist the urge to get and use drugs.
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