Article 43(2)(a) of the Federal Constitution of Malaysia states that the Yang di-Pertuan Agong shall appoint as Prime Minister ‘a member of the House of Representatives who in his judgment is likely to command the confidence of the majority of the members of that House’. Within a span of five years (2018-2022), this power was exercised four times to appoint four different Prime Ministers. This article looks retrospectively at those unprecedented events, and prospectively at how we should navigate future instances of constitutional uncertainty. This article argues that article 49A of the Federal Constitution of Malaysia, which was specifically introduced in 2022 to curb the problem of party-hopping, may turn out to have the exaptational function of providing an unexpected, win-win solution to the matter of discretionary uncertainty. This exaptational lesson signals the potential for a novel use of constitutional tools to effect incremental change in measured doses, as Malaysia transitions from a dominant-party state to a vibrant multi-party democracy.

This article explains the historical origins of key provisions on theft, criminal misappropriation of property, and criminal breach of trust in the Indian Penal Code 1860. Still in force in many jurisdictions, these provisions originated from three strands of jurisprudence prevalent in colonial India: English ideas of larceny, modified Islamic ideas of theft and embezzlement, and Jeremy Bentham’s ideas on codification. These ideas interwove to produce a syncretic scheme of property crimes. Even today, this scheme accommodates different views as to whether theft should be distinguished from adjacent crimes in terms of actus reus. As the Singaporean case of Ho Man Yuk (2019) reveals, this flexibility allows the colonial-era Penal Code to be used to punish new forms of property appropriation, but at the cost of contested convictions and potentially unfair sentencing. Moving forward, the question is whether these issues are worth confronting, or whether Penal Code jurisdictions are better off overhauling the law, creating a general crime of property appropriation resembling theft in the United Kingdom Theft Act 1968. This modern dilemma is potentially unresolvable. It is rooted in the intellectual interplays occasioned by British colonial rule.

This article critically examines the Supreme Court of India’s use of life imprisonment without the possibility of remission or parole (LWORP) as a sentencing alternative to the death penalty. While the Constitution Bench in V Sriharan v Union of India (2015) upheld the constitutionality of such sentences, it did not articulate principled standards governing their imposition. This article argues that the absence of such standards has produced a vacuum in LWORP sentencing. To substantiate this claim, we analyse fifty-three Supreme Court judgments delivered between 2016 and 2024 in which death sentences were commuted to LWORP. The analysis reveals widespread inconsistency and arbitrariness in the treatment of aggravating and mitigating factors, an absence of reasoned justification for choosing LWORP over simple life imprisonment, and no coherent basis for determining the duration of LWORP. In cases involving sexual offences, the brutality of the crime frequently eclipses mitigating considerations, replicating patterns associated with capital sentencing. We argue that LWORP, as currently administered, imports the arbitrariness of death penalty jurisprudence into non-capital sentencing while simultaneously marginalising reformation and rehabilitation as sentencing objectives. The article concludes by cautioning against the unprincipled expansion of LWORP and highlighting the need for a more structured and transparent sentencing framework governing its use.

The private trust trend in Japan, emerging around 2013 and accelerating from 2017, represents a significant shift in Japanese trust practice. It involves elderly individuals creating private trusts primarily for asset management purposes. This development has generated serious legal concerns because legal practitioners, particularly judicial scriveners who have marketed private trusts as flexible solutions, often lack adequate expertise in trust law principles. Rather than relying on third-party monitoring mechanisms, which is the predominant current approach, this article proposes to address the emerging problems through a preventive approach. The article focuses on clarifying the rules governing the fundamental duties of trustees and on how these rules can be incorporated into trust instrument drafting practices. Such an approach emphasises establishing foundational elements of trustee obligations, specifically the duties of care and loyalty, within trust instruments themselves. The article demonstrates how the duty of care should be implemented through specific obligations and argues that the duty of loyalty must be explicitly incorporated as an enforceable legal requirement. In doing so, this article aims to lay essential groundwork for comprehensive regulatory frameworks that can effectively address the challenges posed by Japan’s growing use of private trusts while facilitating their healthy development.

This article examines a hybrid model of startup governance emerging in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy. While existing scholarship has largely focused on the US venture capital paradigm, Indonesia offers an alternative model that blends transactional legal structures with domestic institutional arrangements and a collaborative regulatory environment. Drawing on twenty-four original semi-structured interviews with Indonesian startup founders and investors, the article identifies three defining features of this hybrid model: the widespread use of Singapore-based holding companies paired with Indonesian operating entities; the central role of state-owned enterprises, family conglomerates, and government-affiliated funds; and a cooperative approach to regulatory engagement that contrasts with the adversarial stance adopted in the US. These elements have enabled rapid startup growth but have also produced governance vulnerabilities. Case studies of eFishery and TaniHub illustrate how weak internal controls, blurred governance responsibilities, and misaligned stakeholder incentives can generate strategic failures. The article makes four main contributions to comparative corporate governance: it introduces a novel model of Indonesian startup governance as an alternative to US-based ones; offers a rare account of governance practices in an emerging market; reconceptualises regulatory entrepreneurship in contexts of legal pluralism and state-market interdependence; and demonstrates how legal transplants are implemented in practice.

Donors’ quests for more sophisticated, strategic and connected ways of philanthropic giving, long prominent in the United States, are now ubiquitous around the world. This is one factor in the stratospheric expansion of ‘donor-advised funds’ (DAFs), a form of philanthropic vehicle that enables donors to give to a public charity – including community foundations – claiming an immediate tax deduction, while retaining rights to advise the charity on how to distribute those funds later. The popularity of DAFs has expanded to the Asia-Pacific, where many jurisdictions now provide public philanthropic intermediaries as an institutional response to donor desires. DAFs have been controversial in the United States, while analysis in other jurisdictions has been limited. This article identifies key concerns raised in the US context and compares the institutional responses of Singapore, Japan and Australia, focussing on the degree to which the responses address those concerns, whilst still retaining the advantages of intermediaries. In doing so, it identifies how different regulatory approaches are possible, and likely desirable, due to differences between the three jurisdictions. The analysis also helps to predict whether public philanthropic intermediaries are likely to become a significant feature of the philanthropic landscape in Singapore, Japan and Australia.

In the digital age, the unique characteristics of internet-based communications and online publications can cause unpredictable and irrevocable damage to a person’s reputation at minimal cost. Therefore, revisiting the law of defamation in Sri Lanka to examine its adequacy in addressing cyber defamation is important to maintain a balance between the right to freedom of expression and the right to reputation. The main objective of this article is to assess the adequacy and effectiveness of Sri Lankan law in addressing online defamation disputes. In doing so, this article explores the unique challenges associated with this area, as well as necessary legal reforms, drawing on developments in English and South African law.

How and why is comparative law and society imperative to legal education? In the 21st century, legal education displays a paradox: despite the rise of Asia economically, socially and politically, the study of comparative law rarely includes Asian laws outside of law schools in Asia. In this article, I contribute to the debate over legal education by arguing for the imperative of comparative law and society, and its benefits for law students. I examine how law schools commit practically to comparative law and society by hiring scholars with relevant expertise and offering such subjects. I illustrate this commitment with a case study of Asian legal studies in Australia over the past seven decades (1960s-2020s). I find that Asian legal studies remains concentrated at a handful of law schools, resulting in a problem I describe as the ‘Asian Century gap’ in legal education. Closing this gap requires a renewed commitment to the study of comparative law and society as Asian legal studies through hiring choices and subject offerings. Such a commitment is necessary to ensure that our law students gain the benefits that an education in comparative law and society has to offer.