This article attempts to deal comprehensively with counsel’s authority to compromise a pending action. Particular points sought to be established are that an English barrister, unlike an English solicitor, has nearly absolute implied authority to compromise; that the treatment in a recent English Court of Appeal case of counsel’s apparent authority to compromise is correct and capable of resolving scattered inconsistencies in the case law; and that in a fused profession such as exists in Singapore and West Malaysia, the English case law is generally applicable and further that the barrister cases are tentatively to be preferred where the question is one of implied authority to compromise.

This article seeks to further clarify the following issues on indefeasibility: (1) the availability of the remedy of specific performance in an LTA, s 47(3) situation; (2) the applicability of constructive trusts in post-registration fraudulent situations; and (3) the power of the courts to rectify the land-register under LTA, s 160. The discussion will attempt to provide a principled and just approach in resolving the conundrums posed by these loose ends.

In this article, we suggest that the U.S. Congress could implement a legislative provision prohibiting copyright protection for incidental product features in the context of parallel imports. The U.S.would not be the first country to implement such a provision. In 1994, Singapore pioneered the adoption of a similar provision, which was introduced as an amendment to the SG 1987 Copyright Act. A few years later, in 1998, Australia incorporated a similar amendment to its Aust. Copyright Act 1968. In this article, we analyse in detail the Singapore and Australia provisions and, building upon these provisions, we suggest a specific amendment that the U.S. Congress could introduce into the U.S.Copyright Act of 1976.

This article considers the salient arguments of John Finnis, Philip Soper, Michael Detmold, and Deryck Beyleveld and Roger Brownsword, all of whom published important works on jurisprudence in the 1980s. Their theories challenge the prevalent Legal Positivist assumption that law and morality are logically separate. Some argue that a connection exits between the two in the purpose of law; others in its procedural aspects. Drawing on the insights of Aristotle, Aquinas and Kant, amongst others, these writers have revived and redefined the hitherto moribund tradition of Natural Law theorising.

In Australian Consolidated Press v Uren, a 1970 decision on appeal from Australia, the Privy Council acknowledged that there was scope for divergent development of the common law in different jurisdictions. Statements of the Privy Council in several cases in the 1980s indicate that the Privy Council may have developed a more negative attitude toward divergent development of the common law, at least in those jurisdictions which have retained appeals to the Privy Council. In this article the author discusses the development of the common law in each of the jurisdictions which has given rise to one of the decisions of the Privy Council containing statements on divergent development of common law - Australia, Malaysia, Hong Kong and New Zealand. He then summarises his conclusions on the most important factors determining the scope for divergent development. Finally, he discusses the implications of the above analysis to the situation in Singapore.

It is a widespread phenomenon that online platforms which enable users to upload copyright-protected content use software-based tools that automatically identify and restrict copyright-infringing user uploads based on algorithms – so-called upload filters. The European Union is currently at the forefront of the development to govern upload filters through legislation, both with regard to requiring platforms to filter infringing content (Art 17 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market) and with regard to mitigating risks of automated filtering (especially through the newly adopted Digital Services Act). Against this background, this article analyses the European approach to algorithmic enforcement of copyright and compares it with the situation in the United States. After laying out the legal foundations from which the necessity to engage in algorithmic enforcement results, this article focuses particularly on legal approaches to avoiding the restriction of permissible content (“overblocking”).

The defence of qualified privilege has developed in the defamation law of many countries that share English legal heritage. Malaysian cases have applied, in particular, English or Australian developments in qualified privilege. However, Malaysian judgments have not engaged in a close analysis of how the foreign changes arise under Malaysian law. This article explains how the Australian developments appear difficult to apply within the Malaysian context, while the English developments offer a clear avenue for Malaysian defamation law's modernisation. The key reason for this is the way in which the English Reynolds privilege can be seen to have its origins, at least in part, within the common law as well as within European human rights standards. The common law aspects of Reynolds, apparent from a wide range of English judicial statements, offer a doctrinal basis for the existing and future application of the Reynolds defence in Malaysian defamation law.