Jason Grant Allen is a legal scholar whose work examines how law, institutions, and markets adapt to technological change. He is an Associate Professor at SMU Yong Pung How School of Law, Director of the SMU Centre for Digital Law, and an Urban Fellow at the SMU Urban Institute. His expertise lies in applied legal theory at the intersection of public and private law. His work uses conceptual analysis to clarify practical and emerging problems in diverse areas. His monograph, Non-Statutory Executive Powers and Judicial Review (Cambridge University Press, 2022), develops an office-based account of executive power that clarifies the legal status of non-statutory powers and their amenability to judicial review. This forms part of a wider body of work in public law theory, institutional analysis, and the legal concept of office. He has also published widely on digital assets and monetary law, computational law and AI governance, and the institutional conditions for responsible technology adoption, including in leading journals and through major edited volumes and handbook projects. Jason was educated at the University of Tasmania, Universität Augsburg, and the University of Cambridge, where he completed his PhD as Poynton Scholar. He is a qualified lawyer in New York and Australia (currently non-practising), clerked for Sir Geoffrey Vos (then Chancellor of the High Court of England and Wales), and held an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Jason has received research funding from agencies in the UK (ESRC), Germany (DFG), and Singapore (AISG). His work reflects a commitment that contemporary legal problems require both conceptual clarity and interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as collaboration with policymakers and industry.
Qualifications
- PhD in Law, University of Cambridge
- Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice, College of Law Australia
- LLM in International Economic Law, Universität Augsburg
- BA & LLB (Hons), University of Tasmania
- Attorney and Counselor-at-Law (New York)
- Australian Lawyer
Research Areas / Areas of Specialisation
- Law and emerging technology
- Constitutional and administrative law
- Comparative law
- Concepts of property
- Legal theory
- Monetary law
- Law and finance