Common Law and Civil Law Perspectives on Tort Law is a comparative work that provides both contextual insights into and practical analysis of tort law in selected common law and civil law jurisdictions, including France, Italy, Germany, England, and the United States. The book is divided into eight chapters, with Chapter 1 setting out the place of tort law in the respective legal systems. This is in some ways the most interesting chapter as it locates tort law within the social, cultural, and political contexts of the jurisdictions. As the authors note, tort law reflects to some degree the values a society places on risk allocation, mutual obligations, and protection of the vulnerable. It is dynamic and shaped both by legislation and judicial decisions. While the book purports to deal with tort law, in fact it is largely concerned with the tort of negligence.

This work is essentially an update of the authors’ earlier three editions of Criminal Law in Malaysia and Singapore (2007, 2012, 2018) but with one crucial difference. This latest monograph deals only with Singapore, and no longer pairs it with Malaysia. One may justifiably wonder why this separation has taken 57 years more than the political event which created the two independent jurisdictions in 1965. There are two ways of regarding this phenomenon. First, one can attribute this to the near universality and timelessness of the original Indian Penal Code which both Singapore and Malaysia inherited during the days of Empire. Notwithstanding progressively growing divergences in the political, social, cultural and economic contexts between the two jurisdictions, the Penal Code continued to serve both jurisdictions just as well as before. On the other hand, one can lament the failure in both jurisdictions to reform and update the Code for modern times, leaving judges with the unenviable task of pouring new wine in old bottles. Whilst Malaysia has certainly enacted amendments to its Code, it is in Singapore that we have seen a more concerted and comprehensive programme to renovate the Code, culminating in what are perhaps the most substantial reforms in its history in the great amendments of 2019, following upon the rather more modest set of reforms in 2007. The Criminal Law Reform Act 2019 (Act 15 of 2019) was the tipping point and the prospect of a fourth edition encompassing both jurisdictions began to look unwieldy. Thus, was born a new monograph on Singapore alone, and hopefully the first of more editions to come.

Rigorous legal theoretical work should explain and justify not just substantive legal rules, but also the procedural superstructure within which those rules are invoked, litigated, and given effect. Dr Timothy Liau’s monograph, Standing in Private Law: Powers of Enforcement in the Law of Obligations and Trusts, is an example of this. Against the long-standing view that standing rules are either absent from or inconsequential to private law, Liau argues that courts and commentators should recognise the existence of a general rule of standing in private law – only the primary right-holder has standing to enforce his rights – with several exceptions.