People, including the soon-to-be married and the already married, have the right to enter agreements with each other. Where spouses are content with the terms they negotiated, there is no reason for family law to intervene. At the same time spouses owe one another responsibilities, some of which crystallise only upon their divorce. The law in Singapore balances the interests that arise from both facets of the marital relationship. The law upholds the legality of marital agreements unless they make a mockery of the marital relationship but subjects all of them to the scrutiny of the court, which retains power to make fair financial orders between spouses upon divorce and protect their children. This paper traces current law in Singapore and compares it with law that allows an agreement to displace the court's power.

It is often necessary for a company to reach a compromise with its creditors, and where necessary, third parties. A useful tool for facilitating such a compromise is the scheme of arrangement, a court-controlled procedure for restructuring the relationship between the company and its members or creditors. The scheme provisions are, however, silent on whether a third-party release may be incorporated into a scheme. Since the mid 2000s, the Australian and UK courts have developed two different tests, namely the nexus test and the necessity test, to fill this statutory gap. This paper discusses policy concerns, if any, that the alternative tests have given cause to, and if the answer is ‘yes’, how these concerns should be addressed. The paper concludes that the necessity test does, and the nexus test does not, give cause for concern and that the latter should be adopted for determining scheme jurisdiction in all cases.

This article critically analyses the decision of the Indian Supreme Court in Yashpal and another v. State of Chhattisgarh and others holding the establishment of private universities as unconstitutional. Swayed by the overwhelmingly irresponsible character of the respondent universities, the Supreme Court innovated constitutional arguments to uphold the claims of the petitioners. While intuitively correct in the context of the immediate facts, the judgment, when analysed in the abstract, reveals the self-inflicted harm it has the potential to cause. The judgment is technologically regressive: it fails to account for the emerging trends in education, especially those related to the use of technology and in particular about the emergence of e-education. It is also unconstitutional: it purports to add grounds for judicial review of primary legislation that agreeably is a constituent rather than an adjudicative act. Finally, it is backward looking: it proposes to reintroduce a moralizing rhetoric in the conduct of education, thereby, paving way for poorer educational standards in India. Underlying these distinct inadequacies is a common inability of the Supreme Court to de-link the university as a "project of modernity" from its status as "the ideological apparatus of the nation-state." Universities, for the Indian Supreme Court, are still an embodiment of the "popular will" and, therefore, incapable of being appropriated.

The High Court almost always sits in its judicial capacity with a single Judge. The exceptions are limited. This article is concerned with the expanded constitution of the High Court in the exercise of its criminal and family court jurisdictions, and with the opinion expressed in some recent cases that the enlarged three-judge panel of the High Court might in these contexts be viewed as a de facto Court of Appeal. Upon a contemplation of the consequences said to result from such occasional expansions of the court, it is suggested in this article that the practice, while defensibly founded on practical necessity, should also lead to consideration of another method that could achieve the same_x000D_ outcome.

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.

The housing policies of the Housing Development Board (HDB) apply to more than 80% of Singapore's population who live in HDB flats. This article discusses selected aspects of family law practice which have been affected by some of these policies. It raises concerns involving the way the practice of family law has been shaped mainly by the eligibility conditions imposed for HDB flat dwellers

Part II of the article completes the discussion of the scope of section 93. It goes on to demonstrate the difficulties in the inter-relations of real evidence and documentary evidence.