Malaysia, being a former English colony, inherited a corpus of English law which includes equity and trusts. In recent times, major banks, financial institutions, and trust companies have reimagined the English trust in combination with Islamic law, by offering an innovation called the hibah trust. This instrument represents the Islamisation of the English trust concept where the Islamic idea of the hibah, an inter vivos gift and the English trust is combined as a wealth management offering to clients. This article explores how the hibah trust works, reasons why institutions may be offering this hybrid instrument, and potential challenges to its validity both in the civil and Syariah court.

Chinese elites have celebrated its new Civil Code (2021) as the most important statute in the nation's history, and the ‘cornerstone’ of its turn toward ‘rule of law’. The Code expressly binds all persons, as well as public officials, and is judicially enforceable. The statute enshrines rights to dignity, equality, personal liberty, property, and privacy, among others, and codifies duties to protect the environment and to evolve effective means to combat sexual harassment. Echoing the German Code, the statute also contains ‘general clauses’ that enable the courts to restrict enumerated rights and entitlements for reasons of ‘good morals’, ‘public order’, and the rights of others. While constituting an act of massive delegation to the courts, judges remain prohibited from directly enforcing the PRC's Constitution. The article explores the relationship between the Code and Constitution, through a comparative analysis of: (i) the process of ‘constitutionalising’ the private law around the globe; (ii) the scholarly discourse on the ‘horizontal effect’ of rights in China; (iii) the structure of the Code itself; and (iv) the development of ‘political’ control mechanisms, to be deployed by the Communist Party of China and organs of the state to constrain how judges use their interpretive powers.

Strata titles are a critically important Australian legal export. New South Wales’ (NSW) strata legislation has been particularly influential, having been adopted in numerous jurisdictions, including Singapore in 1967. As a statutory framework, strata law solves the problem of ‘floating freeholds’ by creating indefeasible ownership of individual units in a building, guides owners in managing the development, and sets out the dispute resolution process when disagreements occur.

In an increasing number of jurisdictions (including Singapore and three states in Australia), strata legislation also enables the strata scheme to be terminated and sold for redevelopment where the requisite majority, as opposed to an unanimity of subsidiary proprietors’ consent to the sale. Strata law imposes compensation thresholds that must minimally be paid to dissenting owners. In Singapore, the rule is that no minority owner should suffer a ‘financial loss,’ while in NSW and Western Australia (WA), this amount is pegged to what the owner would theoretically have obtained had the unit been acquired compulsorily by the state. In this article, I compare strata law in Singapore, NSW, and WA in relation to compensation thresholds and explain why the Australian market value standard should also be adequate to compensate unit owners in Singapore.

As the startup ecosystem emerges, Cambodia requires a distinct set of legal frameworks to promote many regulatory aspects to boost national innovation and strengthen the connection of key players in the ecosystem. One of them is financial support for startups, ‘Venture Capital Law’. Therefore, this paper studies the current existing legal framework of Venture Capital (VC) in Cambodia, key bottlenecks that VC encountered, comparative analysis with other countries such as the United States, Japan, and China, and then propose new regulatory frameworks which solve the key bottlenecks and aim to optimise the growth of a startup ecosystem. The finding is that different stages of VC present different bottlenecks such as fundraising (funding source), startup investment (investment readiness of the startup, and deal structure), and exit (immature the capital market for startup's IPO and lack of regulations for Merger and Acquisition (M&A)). The new regulatory frameworks should endorse the use of pension funds as a source of VC funds in the future, encourage private corporations to invest in startup causes, include regulations to promote the readiness of founders, encourage the use of convertible notes, and fasten the regulation governing M&A with the balance of antitrust law.

The 2018 amendments to the People's Republic of China (PRC) Constitution saw the establishment of a system of supervisory commissions, which is a landmark development not only for anti-corruption, but also constitutional law in China. After providing an overview of the background and legal framework of the reform, this article discusses its constitutional implications from three perspectives. First, the reform alters the long-established state structure and creates interesting dynamics of institutional interactions among various branches of state structure. Second, it marks a reversal from the principle of ‘party-state separation’ and raises difficult issues of interface and transition between the party disciplinary system and the formal legal system. Finally, it legalises the previously extralegal practice of shuanggui (‘double specifications’) and affects the individual rights of those subject to investigation. The article concludes with some brief reflections on what this development indicates for the future of the rule of law in China, and highlights the potential for further research.

This article presents how the appraisal right, with the concept of the fair value which includes synergies, has worked in Japanese corporate law. The appraisal right gives dissenting shareholders the ability to protect their interests. The Delaware courts calculate a fair value by excluding synergy effects in appraisal proceedings. One can criticise the exclusion of synergies because the petitioners of the appraisal right might receive less than the merger price. It would be interesting to analyse how the situation changes if the fair value includes synergies. Japanese corporate law gives a good illustration for this. The revision of the Companies Act of Japan in 2005 enhanced the role of the appraisal right by empowering the Court to include synergy value into the determination of fair value. However, Japan's Court developed the doctrine to use the deal price as a fair value with a relatively lax review of the fairness of the deal process. This has resulted in an unattractive situation for petitioners of appraisal remedies, because they rarely gain profits through the appraisal remedy. Empowering minorities in black letter law does not necessarily strengthen minority protection in reality.

General equality rights in written constitutions – rights stating the ideal of equality without specifying categories of impermissible differentiation – have often been effected through the idea of equality as rationality. Equality as rationality demands that differentiations between like entities have to be rationally justifiable. Such equality rights are applicable to legislation and executive action. This presents a prima facie overlap with substantive review in common law administrative law, since substantive review is also concerned about the rational justifiability of executive action. This raises three questions: (1) Are both sets of legal principles indeed similar? (2) Have courts managed to distinguish them in practice? (3) If not, then given that both sets of legal principles exist at different levels in the legal order, how can their similarity be rationalised? This article will study these questions, drawing upon Hong Kong and Singapore law as test cases.