The privilege against self-incrimination is a common law right of respectable antiquity. Recent attempts to water down the right by creating "exceptions" have not been successful. However, statutory intervention to modify or remove the privilege is as old as the right itself. In Hong Kong, as in other common law jurisdictions, there are statutes which impinge upon the right in one way or another. The advent of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights may have further implications, as statutory provisions inconsistent with the Bill are deemed to be repealed. This article traces the development of the privilege in the common law and discusses the possible impact of Art 11(2)(g) of the Bill on certain statutory provisions in Hong Kong.

In Foo Fio Na v. Dr. Soo Fook Mun [2007] 1 M.L.J. 593 ('Foo Fio Na'), the Federal Court of_x000D_ Malaysia rejected the Bolam test in duty of disclosure of risks cases and endorsed the patient-centered approach in Rogers v. Whitaker (1992) 175 C.L.R. 479 ('Rogers'). This article examines the common law developments in England and Australia as well as recent developments in Malaysia in relation to this duty and argues that the decision in Foo Fio Na falls short of its apparent promise of a patient-centred approach. The author proposes that a more appropriate framework to safeguard patient autonomy in Malaysia is required - one that allows for the convergence of the legal and ethical principles relating to a patient's right to know about material risks and one that recognises this right as an extension of the right to life guaranteed by the Malaysian Federal Constitution.

It has always been acknowledged that the duty of disclosure has suffered from an uneven development. Although the duty of utmost good faith has been recognised as a reciprocal one owed by both parties to an insurance contract, it is only in recent years that the duty as owed to the insured has seen any real development. However, although the Skandia litigation did result in a certain degree of clarification, it raised more questions than it answered. This paper will seek to examine some of the uncertainties brought about by the resurrection of this duty. It will further re-examine the issue of damages as a remedy for the breach of the duty, scrutinising in particular the reasons given by the Court of Appeal for rejecting such a remedy.

Res ipsa loquitur applies when a plaintiff who is injured in an accident does not know the precise cause of the accident and has to rely on the occurrence of the accident itself, as an event which does not happen in the ordinary course of things without the negligence, to infer negligence on the part of the defendant. The plaintiff in such a situation is relying on circumstantial or indirect evidence to raise a prima facie case of negligence against the defendant. Used in this way, res ipsa loquitur is an ordinary rule of evidence and it is not peculiar to the tort of negligence. Recent cases in Singapore have adopted this view of the effect of res ipsa loquitur and a Supreme Court of Canada decision has recently held that the Latin phrase employed in this way is useless and confusing, and should be abandoned in the tort of negligence. However, res ipsa loquitur has been used in some older English cases as something beyond a general rule of evidence. It is a unique and a substantive rule of law that shifts the legal burden of proof from the plaintiff to the defendant. On this application of res ipsa loquitur, the plaintiff raises a prima facie case against the defendant from which a court must, at the conclusion of the case, infer negligence, unless the defendant gives a reasonable explanation to disprove the presumption of negligence against him. The defendant is prevented by this use of the doctrine as a special rule of law from exploiting his exclusive and advantageous knowledge of the exact cause of an accident to the detriment of a plaintiff. The issue that is confronted in this article is whether res ipsa loquitur should perish in Singapore as something that merely signifies an ordinary rule of evidence or survive as a unique rule of law in the tort of negligence to correct the imbalance of knowledge that arises in the appropriate cases of proof of negligence by circumstantial evidence.

This article is concerned with recent cases in which the Courts have made pronouncements on the scope and effect of Order 2 of the Rules of the Supreme Court. Order 2 governs the orders and directions which a court may give when there has been a failure to comply with the requirements of the rules of court.

The purpose of this Note is to raise a question on which the rules of private international law of the common law, including Singapore, are less satisfactory than they should be. It is written in the light of one part of a seminar conducted at the Singapore Academy of Law in April 2005, but the proximate cause of the investigation was an enquiry as to the application of certain aspects of Singapore’s statutory employment law in cases in which the factual and legal context contains points of contact to countries outside Singapore, or to laws other than the law of Singapore. It is presented in the form of a Note because its aim is to raise the issue as one for thought and further analysis, rather than pretending to give answers which are, in the writer’s opinion, fixed and final. In the current state of the law’s development it is not possible to claim any more for any individual analysis.

This article looks at four aspects of by-laws in a strata scheme in Singapore. In particular, it examines: (a) the applicability of by-laws to units in a strata shopping mall; (b) the appropriateness of using by-laws, which do not apply to all unit owners, primarily to finance the running of a strata scheme; © the validity of by-laws not lodged as required; and (d) the enforcement of statutorily prescribed by laws before a management corporation is constituted. The legal position is discussed and solutions proposed, where applicable.

In Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia, standard retail investor protection laws do not apply to special categories of individual investors, which are broadly based on wealth or income. Prospectuses are not required for the sale of financial products to these investors and they do not have the full benefit of advice relating to the suitability of these products. However, with the increasing complexity of products and potentially unregulated alternative investments such as crypto-assets, this legal framework is increasingly being debated and challenged.We explore the rationale behind the special categories, the implications of falling into these categories and the appropriateness of the current framework. We argue that the existing criteria are anachronistic and inappropriate. Instead, all individuals making investment decisions should have the benefit of a rating framework that is based_x000D_ on both complexity and risks and be subject to a suitability test in the case of complex products.