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.

The ignorance of law rule, embodied in the maxim ignorantia juris non excusat, occasionally conflicts with the fundamental tenet of the criminal law that the morally innocent should not be penalised. It is argued that this rule needs to be reformulated so that reasonable ignorance of law is not excluded as a relevant consideration in criminal matters. A comparative approach is adopted and the discussion is primarily based on the laws of Australia and England with some reference to Canadian and United States jurisprudence. The Penal Code's apparent unequivocal rejection of ignorance of law as a defence has the consequence that local courts have had almost no opportunity to consider the ignorance of law rule and possible exceptions thereto, apart from merely reaffirming that mistake of law is not a defence. The comparative analysis suggests that the ignorance of law rule, while still applicable, has been whittled by several exceptions, the broad thrust of which is that a person who is reasonably ignorant of the law is in fact morally innocent and not deserving of criminal punishment.

Virtual worlds such as Second Life have become increasingly significant in terms of both time and money for their users. As such, it is important to analyse how the law may apply to and resolve disputes that originate in these virtual worlds. This article will focus on the virtual world Second Life, and in particular, the legal concept of land in Second Life which has come into the international legal limelight because of the Bragg litigation against Linden in the United States. Although the dispute was settled, the Bragg litigation raised the issue of the legal status of items in virtual worlds and whether these virtual items can indeed be recognised as property under the Western legal tradition. This is an issue separate from and independent of the question of intellectual property protection. This article will argue that land ownership in Second Life is very much like owning a modified form of leasehold property. Just like in the real world where more than one type of property right can subsist in a given item, this should also be the case in Second Life.

Trade mark law is motivated in part by the goal of protecting certain consumer understandings. But courts typically treat such consumer understanding as a pre-determined, relatively fixed, fact to which the template of trade mark law can be applied and from which answers to the relevant legal questions thus inevitably flow. Prof Dinwoodie challenges this approach as descriptively incomplete and prescriptively harmful. He argues that trade mark law should be less fixated on ascertaining, acting upon, and declaring, empirical realities of consumer association and confusion. Instead, courts need more openly – and more fully – to understand trade mark law as a normative project. In this climate, efforts to enhance the quality of factual input to particular trade mark disputes should be a lower priority for trade mark law. And, if over-emphasised in ways that downplay the normative character of trade mark law, such well-intentioned efforts at improved empiricism may even be counterproductive.