Privacy has been said to be a concept in an utter mess. In his influential treatise, The Rights of Publicity and Privacy (2nd ed., 2005), J. Thomas McCarthy laments: "It is apparent that the word 'privacy' has proven to be a powerful rhetorical battle cry in a plethora of unrelated context. Like the emotive word 'freedom', 'privacy' means so many different things to so many different people that it has lost any preciselegal connotation that it might once have had" (at para. 5.59). Data Protection Law in Singapore, edited by Professor Simon Chesterman, is a timely and muchwelcomed collection of essays that not only address myriad perspectives on the issue of data protection, but also provide tantalising views on the challenges to privacy and sovereignty brought about by the digital revolution. Singapore enacted the Personal Data Protection Act 2012 (Act 26 of 2012) [PDPA] on 15 October 2012 and it came into effect on 2 January 2013, with businesses given 18 months to comply before the PDPA became enforceable on July 2014. The book's examination of the way in which Singapore has responded to the problems brought about by data collection, aggregation, use and dissemination in the 21st century through the enactment of the PDPA will no doubt be of great interest to practitioners, policy makers and legal scholars.

In the opening of the Legal Year 2020, Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon emphasised the continual imperative to build a justice system that better meets society’s justice needs. He laid out the context (at para 41 of his Response): "These enduring problems are a legacy of a justice process that was conceived in a different era and which was founded on a philosophical preference for argument and adjudication as primary methods of dispute resolution. That model of justice is increasingly straining to meet the needs of modern society – one which is evolving faster than ever before; inhabits both the online and offline worlds; faces increasing socio-economic stratification; and confronts a polarised world more prone to conflict and division than peace and multilateralism".