This is the second part of the special symposium section of the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies; the first was published in September 2019. The two symposia issues bring together a collection of papers that look at contemporary issues relating to public law and litigation in Singapore. Despite the flourishing of research in the area in the recent decade, there are a number of areas of public law that remain under-explored. As highlighted in the Introduction to the September 2019 symposium section, not only has there been an increase in the number of applications for judicial review, there has also been an increasing diversity in the issues mooted in courts in recent years. Since the last symposium issue was published, applicants have continued to bring important public law issues to court. The courts have had to consider the effect of ouster clauses in legislation, whether and when courts can adopt a rectifying construction of legislation, the constitutionality of holding general elections in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic implicating once more the_x000D_ 'right to vote' in the courts, the constitutionality of the mode of carrying out the death penalty, challenges of correction directions issued pursuant to the new Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019 and further challenges to section 377A of the Penal Code. The courts have also recently looked at applying a proportionality-style of analysis to the review of the constitutionality of legislation.

Typically, inter-religious conflict posed the main threat to racial and religious harmony in Singapore. In 2009, 'soft constitutional law' norms ordering the distinct but overlapping spheres of 'religion' and 'politics' were extended to a newly emergent public order threat to social harmony. This arises where groups advocating religiously-informed values clash with groups advocating liberalhumanistic values to shape legal policy. The 'AWARE controversy' exemplified such 'culture wars'. A non-government organisation leadership tussle became a public order threat when non-religious parties invoked the spectre of religious activism to agitate other religious and secular groups; this episode received presidential and ministerial attention in major policy speeches, reiterating the rules of engagement between religion and politics in a secular democracy. These informal norms are analysed to ascertain the legitimate role of religion in the public sphere as exercises of religious liberty, and what constitutes a religious 'threat' to public order within the constitutional framework.

Much of the legal thinking in Singapore and Malaysia on the problems of the burden of proof in criminal cases has so far been along textual and historical lines. Little has been said about the principles and policies which ought to govern the decision to place burdens of persuasion on the accused. This article draws on developments in comparative constitutional jurisprudence, especially of the Privy Council and the Canadian Supreme Court, to explore the potential of using the presumption of innocence as a constitutional idiom for the assessment of the prevailing law on the burden of proof borne by the accused in criminal cases.

This article argues that there is a provision in the Singapore Evidence Act for the exercise of judicial discretion to exclude prejudicial evidence. It then considers the English case of Sang with a view to showing that there is a need for development of the privilege against self-incrimination and for a broader conception of prejudice in a trial which takes into account inadequacies in the preparation for trial occasioned by the manner evidence is procured. The inter-relations of Sang and evidentiary legislative provisions (especially in the Road Traffic Act) are also examined.

Taking its point of departure from the decision of the United Kingdom Supreme Court in FHR_x000D_ European Ventures, this article seeks to bring cross-disciplinary perspectives to bear on the question whether an agent should hold the bribe he has received on constructive trust for his principal. Economising models are employed and the results interpreted by reference to the Calabresi and Melamed tripartite scheme of property rule, liability rule and inalienable right. The results are at least three-fold. First, an effective legal rule responding to the problem of harm caused by corruption must recognise and take account of differences between competitive and non-competitive environments and auditing or monitoring possibilities. Second, a property rule fails to do that. Third, ignoring such endogenous and exogenous variables, it overestimates or underestimates the harm suffered by victims of corruption.

Intestacy law is an important area of property and succession law because some people do not make valid wills. The values and expectations of a society will generally influence the raming of intestacy rules. The intestacy schemes presently operating in Australia, England and Singapore are no exception. This article describes how the law in each of these jurisdictions has changed since the 19th century. It compares and contrasts the major elements of the intestacy schemes in Australia, England and Singapore. It is argued that in Australia and England an important priority is the protection of the economic well-being of the surviving spouse (broadly defined). In recent decades, law reformers in both jurisdictions have articulated an emerging priority for intestacy law: the enhancement of the economic well-being of the aged surviving spouse. Singapore's statutory intestacy regime has remained stable since its implementation in 1967. It evidences the concern that not only the spouse, but also that in certain circumstances, lineal descendants and ascendants ought to inherit from the intestate. Therefore, the concept of immediate family not only includes the spouse, but the issue and parents of the intestate.

It has been said that rules relating to standing (locus standi) in public law try to resolve the conflict between the "desirability of encouraging people to participate actively in the enforcement of the law" and the "undesirability of encouraging meddlesome interlopers invoking the jurisdiction of the courts in matters in which they are not concerned". Nonetheless, standing rules that are excessively restrictive may result in certain forms of governmental action being virtually immune from judicial scrutiny. This article argues that recasting the standing rules to focus on an applicant's suitability to bring a claim and whether the claim is sustainable on its merits accords better with the courts' role as a check on the political branches of government and their duty to uphold the rule of law.

The objective of this study is to present a systematic, structural outline of that sector of jurisprudence known as the science of law. The purpose is to offer an analytical tool for understanding law and its historical development in any society. The approach integrates large parts of sociological jurisprudence and analytical jurisprudence. For the most part they complement one another. While analytical jurisprudence is concerned with the meaning of legal concepts and their degree of logical consistency, sociological jurisprudence is concerned with assembling facts about the contents, origins and impacts of legal norms and using social science methods to estimate cause and effect. Where they conflict, sociological jurisprudence is given precedence over analytical. For example, law is treated as an open, growing social order, not a closed one. The view here is that a social theory of law can have the rigor of theory in the social sciences. It is concerned in part with generalizing about the recorded decisions of those persons in societies who have been delegated authority to make binding, enforceable decisions to settle disputes. To the extent that these generalizations can be tested and shown to have predictive value, they meet the criterion of scientific method.