Trade mark owners have increasingly been acting similarly to those they accuse of infringement or dilution of their marks. They are acting as “ownfringers”. They have been engaging in previously unheard-of competitor collaborations, collaborations with businesses in distant spaces, and self-parody. These trends typify how trade mark owners are increasingly behaving like the third parties they pursue for infringement. How should trade mark law think about these new, prevalent behaviours by mark owners? Perhaps it is just par for the course because mark owners have the right to use their marks in commerce in ways that would constitute infringement if done by third parties. Even so, by engaging in ownfringement, trade mark owners are potentially altering the balance or calculus of a number of fundamental aspects of trade mark doctrine. I explore three important doctrinal impacts of ownfringement: on likelihood of consumer confusion, trade mark distinctiveness and self-dilution, and the parody defence.

Under section 73 of the Conveyancing and Law of Property Act, the insured can easily create a trust of the life policy taken out by him. Unfortunately, however, problems often occur. Such a statutory trust has in many a case been unwittingly created by the life assured without his ever realising the full consequences of what he had done. The present article discusses how this unwarranted situation can arise (including the different kinds of interests thereby constituted) as well as how the resulting trust may drastically restrict the insured's rights and options under the policy.

By an examination of the legal test which sets the standard of care in medical negligence cases - the so-called "Bolam test" - and its application by the courts in the resolution of three basic questions raised by the treatment of patients, this article maintains that English judges have tended to reduce questions about what the law ought to be to questions about what doctors, or a body of doctors, actually do or think. This tendency will be criticized as the delegation of judicial responsibility, a delegation which is particularly inappropriate when the matters delegated to medical opinion fall outside medical competence.

In Shopee Singapore Pte Ltd v Lim Teck Yong [2024] SGHC 29 and MoneySmart Singapore Pte Ltd v Artem Musienko [2024] SGHC 94, the Singapore High Court struck down two non-competition clauses for being unreasonably wide, once again casting the enforceability of non-competition clauses into the legal limelight. This paper reviews the relevant case law since the seminal case of Man Financial (S) Pte Ltd v Wong Bark Chuan David [2008] 1 SLR(R) 663 to clarify the ambit of an enforceable non-competition clause, as well as highlight several uncertainties regarding the restraint of trade doctrine in the employment context. In particular, this paper points out that: (a) it is unclear whether an employer is required to protect its interest in maintaining a stable and trained workforce exclusively via a non-solicitation clause; and (b) it is unclear whether the narrower scope of a broader clause may be pleaded and enforced.

The decision of the United Kingdom Supreme Court in The Res Cogitans has had a profoundly upsetting impact on the law of sale of goods, upsetting many decades of a common understanding about the nature of a sale of goods contract. In a contract for the supply of bunker fuels, the supplier reserved the property in the goods but permitted the shipowner to consume the bunkers before payment and therefore before the property was intended to pass. This supply contract, moreover, was the fourth in a series of contracts on broadly similar terms. The contract was held not to be one of sale of goods because it did not require the property in the bunkers to pass to the shipowner. In reaching this outcome, the court remitted this type of supply contract to the common law, giving rise to a series of potential problems highlighted in this article. The litigation was sparked by the question whether the supplier could maintain a debt action for the price of the goods. In holding that_x000D_ the contract was not one of sale, the court was able to give the supplier its price action without being confined by the apparent limitations on such an action as laid down in the Sale of Goods Act and as expressed at earlier stages in the litigation. Dicta in the Supreme Court, however, have broadened significantly the circumstances in which a sale of goods action for the price may be maintained. Had the broader availability of the price action been decided earlier in the litigation, we should probably not have arrived at the conclusion that this contract was not one of sale of goods.

This article examines and attempts to refute the proposition that prerogatives at common law exist in Malaysia by virtue of devolution from the Crown onto the Yang di-Pertuan Agong. It goes on to consider the possibility of prerogatives existing in Malaysia by virtue of the vesting of executive power under the Constitution, drawing a distinction in this regard between external and domestic prerogatives, and concludes with an analysis of the problem of the royal assent which was resolved by the constitutional crisis of 1983/4.