Latent or hidden effects of laws have received little attention from social scientists and (outside the oral tradition of practicing lawyers) almost none from the legal profession. Such effects, and often latent functions too, may differ sharply from the particular laws' ostensible purposes. Taking, as this writer does, defamation as an illustration, the law's ostensible manifest purposes ( (i) to restore, so far as possible - by monetary compensation or other means - the unlawfully injured person's reputation to its pre-defamed state, and (ii) to punish contumacious action by award of exemplary damages ) is shown to be subordinated, perhaps even supplanted, in several quite common situations where the rules and procedures bend to achieve outcomes different from those advertised by the law. Some such effects are unplanned; some plainly are engineered. A few may be viewed by one or both parties as beneficial; others as destructive. Those issues aside, judges, lawyers, litigants and the public might agree that things ought to be called, and be seen to operate, by their proper names and by undisguised procedures. The example of the late Robert Maxwell is used to show how a person of wealth and power could long exploit defamation laws to shield a questionable business reputation from legitimate questioning. That saga serves mainly as a springboard to examination of half-a-dozen other critical issues. Each involves the masking or manipulation of defamation rules and latches attention onto their moral, cultural or economic ramifications. Latency is demonstrably present in law. To ignore it, or to regard it as excrescence or contradiction, is to short-change all parties to the business of social and legal reform.

Did the recent UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) conclude with only pious aspirations or solid achievements? Among the documents adopted at UNCED was Agenda 21, an ambitious plan of action to tackle both global and national environmental problems, a Statement of Principles on Forests, and the Rio de Janeiro Declaration on Environment and Development. This article considers what influence, if any, the Rio Declaration might exert in relation to the further development of international environmental law.

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.

The position of a charterer under a time charterparty in respect of his obligation to give contractually valid orders as to the employment of the vessel have spawned numerous problems. Amongst these are the matters which pertain to orders relating to the employment of the vessel as the termination of the charter period approaches. This article discusses the position of the contracting parties in respect of such orders.

This paper attempts a critical analysis of the reasons which are often advanced and those which may be advanced to justify the elimination of accumulated preferred dividend arrears through corporate recapitalization schemes. It will also develop an argument based primarily on fundamental legal and economic principles to support the need for greater protection of preferred stockholders from such recapitalization schemes. The paper also explains why in the writer's opinion, the existing legislation in many of the American states and in Singapore are inadequate for this purpose.

The Land Titles Act permits limited application of the law of acquiring title by adverse possession to registered land. This article examines the provisions of the Act and recent cases on the interpretation of these provisions. The Land Titles Bill 1992 proposes to abolish acquisition of title by adverse possession altogether in regard to registered land. The proposed amendment and the transitional provisions are also considered.