This article aims to assess the role played by the rule of law in discourse by critics of the Singapore_x000D_ Government's policies and in the Government's responses to such criticisms. It argues that in the past the two narratives clashed over conceptions of the rule of law, but there is now evidence of convergence of thinking as regards the need to protect human rights, though not necessarily as to how the balance between rights and other public interests should be truck. The article also examines why the rule of law must be regarded as a constitutional doctrine in Singapore, the legal implications of this fact, and how useful the doctrine is in fostering greater solicitude for human rights.

This article examines the English and local cases dealing with the jurisdiction agreements that point non-exclusively to a particular forum. It considers the effect the law has accorded, and should accord, to such agreements in two main contexts: the granting of leave for service out of jurisdiction or the stay of proceedings commenced in the local forum, as the case may be, and the granting of anti-suit injunctions to restrain parties from commencing or continuing with foreign proceedings in non-contractual fora. It argues that an approach sensitive to the parties' intention for having such agreements, the inference of which depends on the finding of particular factors in each case, would perhaps provide the best guide for the effect the law should accord to such agreements.

Tan Keng Feng, who died in December 2016, was a member of NUS Faculty of Law for over 30 years until his retirement in 2005. Professor Tan introduced generations of students to Tort Law. This compilation of papers to mark the 60th anniversary of the Law Faculty provides a timely opportunity to pay tribute to our colleague by examining the Faculty's influence (both direct and indirect) on the development of Tort Law in this jurisdiction.

This article examines the theoretical justifications in awarding restitutionary damages for civil wrongs and argues that restitutionary damages should be available as of right so long as appropriate rules of causation and remoteness to the different kinds of wrongs are developed as well. In addition the scope of proprietary remedies should be rationalised and should only be explicable on institutional constructive trust principles. Only exceptionally should the remedial constructive trust be invoked.

This article critiques Birks' "The Law of Unjust Enrichment: A Millennial Resolution." It attempts to articulate the problems inherent in Birks' proposed taxonomy for today's legal system. It puts forward an alternative model of the relationship between wrong and remedy - allowing for flexibility and the concept of appropriateness. Wrong and remedy are not completely independent from each other. They exist in a "sticky" relationship that guides the relief granted in each situation. A hard and fast taxonomy is doomed to failure. This article presents a solution to this problem where taxonomy is based on a loose and dynamic federation of remedies.

This article seeks in three ways to contribute to the continued refinement of contractual interpretation in Singapore following Zurich Insurance and, more recently, Sembcorp Marine. First, it identifies the key rulings of lawderived from the cases. From these will be distilled the relevant issues in contractual interpretation. In the particular context of Singapore,contractual interpretation encompasses related issues such as the admissibility of extrinsic evidence to interpret contracts and the substantive method used to interpret contracts. It is important to identify and distinguish between the exact issues because their conflation will lead to confusion in an area already affected by much complexity due to the concurrent application of statutory and common law principles. Second, this article evaluates the courts' approaches to those issues. The principal difficulty, as will be seen, is that there is a need to distinguish between statutory and common law principles. This is affected by the perceived need_x000D_ of adhering to the modern commercial reality of contextual interpretation, while balancing that with_x000D_ binding statutory materials. Third, this article suggests some possible reforms in the future. It_x000D_ considers whether it is possible to achieve a commercially sensible approach while keeping within_x000D_ the statutory constraints that bind the courts, or whether legislative reform is required.

This article argues that theories of interpretation and pragmatics offer solid proof that the rule-based model of construction is flawed and that the judicial shift to commercial interpretation is correct. One insight gained by analysing in the light of these theories what the courts in fact do when they construe commercial contracts is the impossibility of limiting the context to any given set of data, since the contextual-dependence of sentences is both the generator and resolver of any set of interpretative hypotheses. Other valuable insights are that a principle of rationality is necessarily presupposed in any institutionalised interactive goal-oriented communication and that the principle of instrumental rationality necessarily presupposed in the making of a contract is that the assignment of meaning shall accord with the commercial purposes of the contract.