Beginning life in 1959 as the University of Malaya Law Review, the journal has undergone several transformations over the past half century, becoming first the Malaya Law Review and then the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies. In addition,it has also spawned two other journals - the Singapore Journal of International and Comparative Law (now the Singapore Yearbook of International Law) and the Asian Journal of Comparative Law. This essay takes a historical look at the development of the journal and the key personalities who have made it one of Asia's most respected legal publications.

The notion of public interest in sentencing conjures up images of utilitarian consequentialism and the emergence in Singapore of a role for public interests analysis in sentencing may create a superficial impression of judicial hardening and the beginnings of a new and repressive law and order ideology. This article demonstrates that the impression is not only superficial but also false. Its central argument is that public interests analysis is or has the potential to contribute clarity and add value to desert-based sentencing and that taken together with judicial benchmarking, which it complements, reflects a model of desert, which is neither deontological nor empirical. Nevertheless, the resultant model is not necessarily inferior to either.

Religion is almost universally guaranteed as a fundamental liberty and human right, although the scope of religious freedom and understandings of religious identity within secular democracies are informed by the specific model of constitutional secularism practiced. States often evidence an ambivalent attitude towards religion, treating it as Law's Other, that is, a competing normative system which has regulative force on social behaviour and influences conceptions of citizenship and affective loyalties. This article examines the interpretive method of two secular Asian courts, which are meant to be bastions of impartiality, in negotiating questions of religious identity and religious freedom. It analyses the judicial weighting and balancing of relevant competing factors and considers the varied understanding of what secularity requires and whether the concerns of religious minorities are adequately safeguarded within secular polities where religion remains an important social force.

This article examines the claim of securities markets efficiency based on the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH), which Fama proclaimed to be a well substantiated truth in 1978. Behavioural theory shows that individuals do not act to maximise their utility as asserted by neoclassical economists, while entrepreneurial theory explains share price movements to be the product of error prone guesswork by market participants. Alongside this, the emergence of the shareholder value concept in the late 1980s advocated by both corporate managers and outsider market makers has undermined the very foundations of share price efficiency. This undermining seems to have been caused by forces exogenous to the firm. Nonetheless, securities markets are highly competitive. This article explains the need for a new theory to explain the inherent paradox.

Despite a steady trickle of enforcement actions taken against market misconduct by the Singapore regulators, no securities class actions have arisen out of these enforcement actions, which have ranged from misleading statements and market manipulation to the failure to comply with on-going disclosure obligations. This article examines whether the paucity of securities class actions might be attributable to the nature of the rights that securities investors possess. In doing so, the analysis reveals answers to an important theoretical question - the extent to which current rights protect the securitiesinvestor's interest in the fair and accurate pricing of securities.

This article looks mainly at the recent changes to the law relating to financial assistance in Singapore, but in doing so will also consider the treatment of the same rule in other jurisdictions. It does so with a hope that it will be helpful to the ongoing consideration of its further reform in Singapore and elsewhere.

The story of "Personal Equities" in Singapore is a fascinating one. The first successful claim of a "personal equities" outside the statutory regime in Singapore surfaced some forty years after the introduction of the Torrens system in 1956. Subsequently, the "personal equities exception" was affirmed by one Court of Appeal and rejected by another. Since then, the Singapore courts have proceeded on the basis that there is a finite list of "personal equities" listed in section 46(2) of the Land Titles Act. This article proposes to explore these developments and demonstrate that the "personal equities exception" is in truth not an exception to indefeasibility. As a matter of statutory interpretation, such claims are simply not caught in the first place by the principle of indefeasibility as conferred by section 46(1) of the Land Titles Act. As such, potential "personal equities" claims ought not to be limited by section 46(2) exclusively.

In Foo Fio Na v. Dr. Soo Fook Mun [2007] 1 M.L.J. 593 ('Foo Fio Na'), the Federal Court of Malaysia rejected the Bolam test in duty of disclosure of risks cases and endorsed the patient-centered approach in Rogers v. Whitaker (1992) 175 C.L.R. 479 ('Rogers'). This article examines the common law developments in England and Australia as well as recent developments in Malaysia in relation to this duty and argues that the decision in Foo Fio Na falls short of its apparent promise of a patient-centred approach. The author proposes that a more appropriate framework to safeguard patient autonomy in Malaysia is required - one that allows for the convergence of the legal and ethical principles relating to a patient's right to know about material risks and one that recognises this right as an extension of the right to life guaranteed by the Malaysian Federal Constitution.

The Court of Appeal affirmed the legality of a prenuptial agreement on division of matrimonial assets and held that it is always subject to scrutiny under section 112 of the Women's Charter. This note deals only with these principles.

In the case of Statoil A.S.A. v. Louis Dreyfus Energy Services L.P., Aikens J. has reasserted the traditional principles of English lawgoverning unilateral mistake. On one level, it is an unexceptional decision. It applies the well-settled law relating to unilateral mistake, based on long-established authority and as a reflection of the approach taken recently by the Court of Appeal to the significance of mistake in contract. On the other hand, the issues raised by the case prompt a re-examination of the approach of English law to unilateral mistake.