Since 1981, Singapore courts have the power, upon granting a decree which terminates a marriage, to order the division between the spouses of matrimonial assets which they had acquired during the course of the marriage. This article discusses this power as part of the law on the effect of marriage upon the ownership of assets. It examines the scope of the power as it has been developed by the courts and suggests improvements should an amendment be contemplated.

In 2005, the archaic laws of sedition were summoned to counteract speech considered offensive to racial and religious groups in Singapore. Under the Sedition Act, it is seditious to, inter alia, promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population. In a later case involving religious proselytisation, a Christian couple was charged and convicted of sedition under the same section. This article examines this new phenomenon. It investigates the manner in which these laws have been employed and jurisprudentially developed to restrain speech on race and/or religion in Singapore. The article argues that the current state of the law is highly problematic for its adverse impact on free speech as well as for its conceptual confusions with alternative bases for restraining speech. It contends that failure to extricate the existing conceptual confusions is adverse to free speech and community integration in the long run. A threefold legal framework is proposed to provide clearer guidance on inter-racial and inter-religious interaction within the Singaporean society.

This paper confronts the continued viability of two entrenched features of administrative law in Singapore. First, it argues that the taxonomy for organising the grounds of judicial review (illegality, irrationality and procedural fairness) is likely to be incrementally tested in Singapore through the development of newer grounds of judicial review. This paper looks at three particular grounds of review to exemplify this: review for errors of law; review for errors of fact and the doctrine of substantive legitimate expectations. Secondly, and related to the first, the paper interrogates the continued utility of the 'truism' that courts should only review the 'legality' and not the 'merits' of executive decision-making. It argues that this may no longer be an optimal way of balancing the various competing constitutional imperatives at play when determining the appropriate scope of judicial review by courts. Following this critique, the paper provides preliminary thoughts on two modest proposals for how administrative law can move forward to account for the developments that are testing these features of the law. It proposes: (a) a gradual and incremental move away from a taxonomy or categorisation of grounds of review to an approach organised around varying the nature and intensity of review to demarcate the scope and boundaries of judicial review; and (b) a more intentional and careful consideration of the way in which remedies are pleaded by applicants and framed by the courts in their rulings.

A term commonly used in both common law and civil law jurisdictions and in domestic_x000D_ and international tribunals is the Latin term amicus curiae or a 'friend of the court'. Who is this friend of the court and what is his role in legal proceedings? Largely because of the remarkable manner in which this ancient institution has developed in different legal systems and been used differently even in countries sharing a common legal tradition, such as the United States and the Commonwealth countries, the important question is whether the amicus curiae can still be considered a 'friend' of any tribunal or decision maker. Has this friendship been well maintained or significantly abused over the years?

Can a lender take a security interest over an orbiting satellite? This article addresses this question under the laws of Australia, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, and Singapore. The results of this comparative inquiry highlight the legal challenges that reduce the attractiveness of satellite security interests and, as a corollary, the prospects for asset-based satellite financing. More generally, this inquiry indicates the need for space-focused law reform across the region, given the technical and commercial changes underway in the current ‘NewSpace’ era.

This paper makes a medium-term forecast of the future of banking and financial law and lawyers internationally. It expresses the view that the law is essential to societies and that the basic purpose of the law is survival. It explains the rationale of banks as intermediaries for credit, discusses the important role of banking and financial law in the hierarchy of law, shows that there has been a very rapid increase in the size of the law, commencing from 1830 onwards, offers some reasons for the growth of the law and legal risk, such as globalisation and the intensification of regulatory regimes, proposes that there will be a strong demand medium-term for banking and financial lawyers of outstanding competence who can put the world together legally, explains the families of law, discusses various classes of legal risk and explains the high responsibilities undertaken by lawyers_x000D_ in their role in societies.

This paper analyzes the role of multiculturalism in the exercise of administrative discretion. Whether the setting is national security or social welfare eligibility, standards of justice rise or fall on the judgments of individual "front-line" decision-makers. Such decision-makers are the human face of the state. Against this contextual backdrop, this paper addresses a series of critical questions, including: To what extent is the exercise of discretion specifically, and the character of the administrative state more generally, determined by culture and identity? Will decision-makers in a representative public service treat members of their own communities differently than members of other communities? Administrative culture and culture of the society at large are deeply entangled in the exercise of discretion. The reasons for discretionary decisions, in other words, must grapple with and not sidestep the values, beliefs and administrative structures which underlie them. This approach is elaborated in the Canadian context, with particular emphasis on the policy of the federal government to achieve a multicultural public service and the development of impartiality and fairness standards in Canadian administrative law.

The complex relationship between negligence and autonomy is of increasing practical and theoretical interest, as is shown by recent cases such as Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board [2015] UKSC 11, Shaw v Kovac [2017] EWCA Civ 1028 and ACB v Thomson Medical Pte Ltd [2017] SGCA 20. My discussion of this relationship divides into three parts. In the first part, I make some general observations about the relationship between negligence law and autonomy. In the second part, I argue that interference with autonomy per se should not be recognised as a form of damage that grounds a negligence claim, although I acknowledge that it may be useful for the law to recognise specific forms of autonomy loss as damage in this sense. And in the third and final part, I consider the uneasy relationship between negligence doctrine and patient autonomy in the law of liability for medical non-disclosure, and argue that as a result of recent developments, this may no longer be properly described as liability for negligence.