For Singapore’s bench, bar and academy, Law and Technology in Singapore (Second Edition) arrives at precisely the moment when legal method, institutional design and day-to-day practice are being stress-tested by generative AI, platform regulation, digital assets and data-driven decision making. The editors frame the project against a backdrop of “technological advancements … at a breathtaking pace,” with the rise of generative AI and the metaverse among developments that mean “the law cannot stand still”. In his foreword, Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon calls the book’s scope “remarkable,” reflecting technology’s “far-reaching impact … on virtually every aspect of our legal system,” and emphasises a forward-looking posture that keeps pace while maintaining fidelity to “fundamental principles”. For practitioners, policy-makers and scholars seeking a structured, Singapore-specific map through this terrain, the volume is both an indispensable reference and a platform for critical analysis.

In the past two decades, the field of “fashion law” has emerged at the intersection of intellectual property (“IP”) and a multi-billion-dollar global industry driven by creativity and constantly changing trends. Yet the relationship between fashion and IP has remained, in many respects, under-theorised and evolving. Fashion and Intellectual Property, edited by David Tan, Jeanne Fromer and Dev Gangjee, is an impressive and timely collection that brings together leading IP scholars from around the world to explore this complex theme. The book offers a fascinating range of theoretical, doctrinal and policy insights into how various IP laws interact with the fashion industry, exploring the role that fashion plays in society, how fashion exposes the tensions in patent, design, trademark and copyright doctrines, and to what extent IP laws accommodate phenomena like upcycling and cultural appropriation. The result is a rich, scholarly examination of fashion through an IP lens, one that should interest not only IP experts but anyone curious about how law engages with creativity and culture.

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.

In recent years, the world has witnessed considerable advancements in artificial intelligence (“AI”) technology. For example, several chatbots based on large language models (“LLMs”) have been publicly launched, affording users the capacity to generate chunks of text using prompts. In the coming years, it seems that businesses and governments are likely to continue to invest substantially in innovation in AI. Therefore, at least within the near future, AI will probably be a prominent economic and social phenomenon.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the legal dimensions of social enterprises. Several publications have offered broad international comparisons of the legal frameworks governing social enterprises. These include Dana Brakman Reiser et al, eds. Social Enterprise Law: A Multijurisdictional Comparative Review (2023), and Henry Peter et al, eds. The International Handbook of Social Enterprise Law (2023). These books primarily comprise jurisdiction-specific chapters authored by individual researchers.

Can lawyers drive business success instead of just managing risk? Robert C Bird’s answer to this central question, as developed over decades of work culminating in Legal Knowledge in Organizations, is a resounding “yes”. As the first systematic treatment of legal strategy as a source of sustainable competitive advantage, the book shows lawyers and organisations how to turn legal services and departments from cost centres into value creators.