An agreement for the sale and purchase of real property often begins with an option to purchase ("OTP").2 Usually, upon agreeing on the purchase price, the vendor will grant the purchaser an OTP in return for an option fee. During the specified option period, the vendor is bound to keep the property for the purchaser. This affords the purchaser an opportunity to reconsider his or her decision to purchase the property and time to source for financing for the purchase. If the purchaser decides to proceed with the purchase, he or she will exercise the OTP by the prescribed method and within the option period, upon which the vendor is obliged to complete the transaction. In Woo Kah Wai CA, the issue before the Court of Appeal was whether the vendors were contractually obliged to grant an OTP containing terms demanded by the purchaser in the first place. To determine whether a contract to this effect has arisen, it is necessary to examine the method by which the OTP was sought to be procured. This case provides the opportunity to consider how basic principles of contract formation apply in the process of procuring an OTP, and also how subtle legal distinctions between the different methods of procuring an OTP have bearing on practical matters.

Justice demands that a person who is being attacked, or who perceives that he is about to be attacked, should have the right to defend himself. For this reason, both civil and criminal law provide that if a person injures or kills another person while defending himself against an actual or anticipated attack he may, in certain circumstances, escape liability for his act. Unfortunately, though - particularly in civil law - the precise parameters of self-defence have always been somewhat woolly. Although all courts deciding cases in which self-defence has been at issue have agreed on the key requirement that the force used by the defendant must be proportionate to the actual or perceived threat, there has been little examination of the scope of the defence. Recently, however, the House of Lords had the opportunity to review and clarify the nature of self-defence in the high-profile case of Ashley, a tort action which arose from the killing of an unarmed suspect by a police officer who mistakenly believed that the suspect posed an imminent threat. The decision in Ashley - that in civil law, _x000D_ self-defence requires the defendant's belief that he is under serious threat to be both honest and reasonable - is of significance throughout the common law world for the many interesting observations it contains on the differences between civil and criminal law. It is, moreover, of particular interest in Singapore, in light of changes to the Penal Code and proposed changes to the Criminal Procedure Code to limit the criminal liability of police officers who kill or injure suspects during anti-terrorist operations.

The promise of international arbitration as an efficient dispute resolution mechanism has been plagued by the unsavoury practice of parties abusing their due process rights to attack arbitral awards that turn out unfavourably. The Court of Appeal in CMNC v Jaguar Energy sends a clear message that parties themselves must be accountable for raising their procedural objections contemporaneously to the tribunal, rather than reserving them for a second bite at the proverbial cherry.