The legal personality accorded by statute to a company, as distinct from the persons of its members, is probably the most fundamental principle of company law and forms a key building-block of our economic and legal structure. However the principle is not entirely an absolute one: the courts have on occasion asserted their power to disregard that separate personality in order to treat the company as one with its controller. But the rationale and scope of this power have only rarely been articulated in the higher courts. This article focuses on recent judicial analyses of piercing the corporate veil in England, and compares the latest approach of the Singapore courts to the same question.

The requirement that claims in negligence for psychiatric injury must stem from shock-induced damage is both artificial and arbitrary. For this reason, the "shock" requirement has been rejected by the High Court of Australia. However, shock-induced injury continues to be a key criterion in both the U.K. and Singapore, at least in cases not involving medical negligence. This article examines the history of the shock requirement and its application in all three jurisdictions. It concludes that, while the Australian position is to be preferred, there is no immediate indication that the law in either the U.K. or Singapore is likely to be modified to remove the requirement.

Some 1.8 billion people today have a mobile phone and no bank account. Mobile money is the provision of financial services through mobile phones. It offers the substantial potential benefits of financial inclusion to poor people in poor nations. This article explores how trust law can be used to address the key risks these mobile money customers face: bankruptcy of the e-money provider, illiquidity and fraud. Prudential regulation is largely inapplicable because most providers are telecommunications companies and not banks. Trust law is a highly efficacious way to address this regulatory lacuna.

The duty to act for proper purposes is seldom applied and thus is not well-developed in Singapore. The aim of this article is to describe the development of the duty to act for proper purposes in other Commonwealth jurisdictions, and in the process, better understand when an exercise of a power by a director may be subject to review according to the duty. The argument is made that the duty is flexible, capable of application in a wide variety of situations and it is hoped the law as regards this duty has the opportunity to develop in Singapore.

This paper proposes the way forward in dealing with the unsatisfactory case law involving loss of chance in negligence, particularly medical negligence. It seeks to show that the current approach in England and in Singapore of applying traditional causation rules is arbitrary and inadequate, and fails to meet a deserving loss of chance claim. The authors seek to examine whether loss of chance is better understood as a theory of injury instead of a theory of causation. Inspecting major common law jurisdictions and the key controversies in reconciling the case law, it will be advanced that the best method (in terms of justice and doctrinal fit) for the development in tort jurisprudence lies in recognising and valuing lost chances as a new category of damage. A lost chance should be recognised if it fulfils a twofold precondition, namely that: (i) there was a significant chance about the outcome at the time of the alleged negligence; and (ii) the injury which affected the claimant's prospects lay in the future at the time of the alleged negligence. Once this is met, damages may be awarded accordingly in proportion to the chance lost based on a weighted mean.

This paper traces the development of company law during the colonial era in British Malaya, providing details on the laws of the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States. It also presents an account of economic development and the use of the limited liability company form in these two interlinked jurisdictions. The paper notes the lack of connection between the evolution of company law in Malaya, local economic and political developments and the actual local use of the law. We situate this material within three current debates about the nature of colonial company law: whether the law was more a product of the "transplant effect" than of legal family; whether the dispersal of company law to the colonies was as straightforward as is often assumed; and whether the law was best characterised as "imperialism".

This article examines the position in Singapore in relation to the common law category of implication of terms in law. It argues that the test of necessity was indeed laid down for this category by the House of Lords in Liverpool City Council and vigorously applied in subsequent House of Lords' decisions. Although a number of reasons may arguably be advanced to support the application of the test of necessity, Singapore courts do not appear to have applied it albeit alluded to in one case. Further, the criterion of reasonableness has also not been considered in all local cases, highlighting the inconsistent approach adopted. It is argued that, ultimately, policy considerations, fairness and justice might be the true principled test for this category in Singapore.

"When a person acts in an unconscionable way towards another, how should a court, in seeking to achieve 'practical justice', balance and reconcile values of certainty, consistency arising from precedent, overall coherence in the structure of the law, deference to to Parliament on policy issues, and the provision of a remedy appropriate to reverse or prevent harm to the innocent party?”

The author discusses the problem of trafficking in persons, its presence in Singapore and critically analyses relevant Singapore legislation with reference to several thematic critiques on international, supranational and national legal treatments of the problem. An omnibus anti-trafficking legislation for Singapore that takes into account some of those critiques will be proposed.

Due to her colonial history, Singapore has inherited the English common law prohibition against maintenance and champerty. Maintenance refers to the officious intermeddling in litigation. Champerty is a particular form of maintenance where one party agrees to assist another to bring a claim such that the former shall receive a share of what may be recovered in the litigation. Criminal and civil liability for champerty was, however, abolished in England by virtue of the United Kingdom's ("U.K") Criminal Law Act 1967, subject that "any rule of that law as to the cases in which a contract is to be treated as contrary to public policy or otherwise illegal" would not be affected. Subsequently, the U.K. permitted a litigant to employ "a person providing advocacy or litigation services" under a conditional fee agreement,and has, in recent legislative amendments, even allowed damage-based agreements akin to the United States-style contingency fees. These U.K. statutory developments are, however, not applicable to Singapore. Thus, the prohibition against champerty and conditional fees remains firmly part of the Singapore legal landscape, albeit with an important judicial exception to such a prohibition, as the case below demonstrates.