Despite the fact that co-ownership is a very popular form of landholding in Singapore, many aspects of the law relating to it remain unsettled. This article explores the question whether the granting of a mortgage or a lease by one joint tenant severs the joint tenancy. It is argued that in deciding this matter the courts should have regard to the fact that modern law provides a simple and effective means of severance. The courts should not therefore be astute to discover new methods of severance and in particular should avoid any forms of severance which can be effected by one party without the knowledge of the other joint tenants.

The housing policies of the Housing Development Board (HDB) apply to more than 80% of Singapore's population who live in HDB flats. This article discusses selected aspects of family law practice which have been affected by some of these policies. It raises concerns involving the way the practice of family law has been shaped mainly by the eligibility conditions imposed for HDB flat dwellers

In recent years cases have been brought in various jurisdictions involving claims against doctors by persons who are not their patients. The claims have related to AIDS and other sexually communicable diseases which the persons in question have contracted from the doctors' patients. In these cases, the courts have held that doctors owe a duty of care in negligence to warn the sexual partners of their patients (usually via the patients) of the risks involved in participating in a sexual relationship with these patients. This article examines and analyses the relevant cases and considers the direction which the law in this area is likely to take both in Singapore and other Commonwealth countries.

This article examines the establishing of discretionary jurisdiction for International Tort Litigation. The amended Order 11 Rule 1(F) is examined with a view to identifying possible interpretative approaches. Difficulties with past approaches are discussed and a new approach suggested. It is submitted that this new approach will provide the right amount of consistency and flexibility required to meet the challenges of international tort litigation.

In 1993, Parliament enacted Section 9A to legislatively mandate a purposive interpretation of written law. Section 9A also explicitly permits the use of extrinsic materials, eg, explanatory statements, ministerial speeches, Parliamentary debates, etc, in interpreting written law. Seven years after the passage of 9A, this article considers its effects on judicial decisions in Singapore.

During the nineteenth century, liabilities at common law came to be seen as principally divided into those based on contract, which needed consideration, and those based on tortious wrongdoing. Certain instances of liability that had been developed in equity and which were based on what we would now term as "detrimental reliance" did not then meet with acceptance and vanished from the legal scene. Some survived however, and this lecture deals with two of them, which have come to be known as promissory estoppel and proprietary estoppel. The extent of liability under the former, and the remedies under the latter, need reconsideration, and this lecture does this through a discussion of some of the cases in the area, new and old.

Res ipsa loquitur applies when a plaintiff who is injured in an accident does not know the precise cause of the accident and has to rely on the occurrence of the accident itself, as an event which does not happen in the ordinary course of things without the negligence, to infer negligence on the part of the defendant. The plaintiff in such a situation is relying on circumstantial or indirect evidence to raise a prima facie case of negligence against the defendant. Used in this way, res ipsa loquitur is an ordinary rule of evidence and it is not peculiar to the tort of negligence. Recent cases in Singapore have adopted this view of the effect of res ipsa loquitur and a Supreme Court of Canada decision has recently held that the Latin phrase employed in this way is useless and confusing, and should be abandoned in the tort of negligence. However, res ipsa loquitur has been used in some older English cases as something beyond a general rule of evidence. It is a unique and a substantive rule of law that shifts the legal burden of proof from the plaintiff to the defendant. On this application of res ipsa loquitur, the plaintiff raises a prima facie case against the defendant from which a court must, at the conclusion of the case, infer negligence, unless the defendant gives a reasonable explanation to disprove the presumption of negligence against him. The defendant is prevented by this use of the doctrine as a special rule of law from exploiting his exclusive and advantageous knowledge of the exact cause of an accident to the detriment of a plaintiff. The issue that is confronted in this article is whether res ipsa loquitur should perish in Singapore as something that merely signifies an ordinary rule of evidence or survive as a unique rule of law in the tort of negligence to correct the imbalance of knowledge that arises in the appropriate cases of proof of negligence by circumstantial evidence.

Marriage is an equal partnership of efforts so the spouses contribute equally in acquiring property whether by making payment or by homemaking and child caring. A just and equitable division of matrimonial assets, the gains of partnership, at its dissolution should therefore generally be an equal division. This article supports the proposition. First from discussion of a recent decision where the Family Court approved and the High Court on appeal disapproved of it. Then from a more general discussion of the current law in Singapore of the division of matrimonial assets on divorce.

It has long been recognised that when expert witnesses disagree on a matter within their expertise, the court is placed in an unsatisfactory situation of having to choose between experts in a matter which is not within the competence of the judge. This article examines some recent cases where the court has had to make such a choice. It will try to pin down exactly how the court made that choice, and to ask it the way in which the judges break the expert deadlock is satisfactory. Some reform proposals are discussed briefly.