https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21582440211052257

The past decade has witnessed the fast spread of Airbnb, a specific example of sharing economy initiatives. Local governments around the world are struggling with policies and regulations to govern the negative externalities caused by Airbnb. In this respect, knowledge is lacking on differences in governance strategies and their effects. This article starts to fill this lacuna by comparing the governance strategies and their effects of two major, but totally different, cities in terms of governance styles: Singapore and Amsterdam. An analytic framework is developed distinguishing different strategies and governance style in enforcing these strategies and different types of response by sharing economy platforms. The Singapore government applied predominantly a hierarchical approach to address the challenges posed by Airbnb, whereas the Amsterdam government mostly adopted a collaborative approach, resulting in different responses by Airbnb. The article goes deeper into explaining these different governance styles and reflects on their implications as derived from the case studies.

Legal academics were once thought to be parasitic on the work of judges, so much so that citing academic work was said to weaken a judgment's authority. Recent times have however seen prominent academics appointed to the highest courts, and judicial engagement with academic materials appears to have increased. In this light, this article empirically studies academic citation practices in the Singapore High Court. Using a dataset of 2,772 first-instance High Court judgments, we show that citation counts have indeed increased over time. This increase was distributed across most legal areas, and was not limited to, though more pronounced in, judgments authored by judges with post-graduate law degrees. Books, not journal articles, have consistently accounted for the bulk of the court's citations. The study sheds new statistical light on the evolving relationship between judges and academics, particularly in the context of an Asian, first-instance court. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

This paper traces emerging legal-spatial practices of exclusion of trafficked migrant fishers from the human and labour rights protections of anti-trafficking. I introduce the idea of jurisdictional exceptionalism–that is practices that invoke particular demarcations of sovereignty to avoid protection responsibilities–to conceptualise these geographies of exclusion. Singapore, as a transit state for trafficked migrant fishers and location of labour agencies managing their contracts, is drawn on to illustrate one key spatial tactic of jurisdictional exceptionalism; namely, deflection. The discussion engages with recent critical and feminist geopolitical insights concerning the production and perpetuation of (in)security through legal-geographical exclusions. © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Wham Kwok Han Jolovan v Public Prosecutor is potentially the most important constitutional decision ever rendered by the Singapore Court of Appeal, insofar as it heralds a new and more intrusive approach to the judicial review of rights claims in Singapore. The ruling expressly overturned deference postures associated with the “presumption of constitutionality,” at least with respect to Article 14 of the Constitution; it consolidated dicta announcing the reconfiguration of separation of powers doctrines; and it developed and deployed a rudimentary, if yet incomplete, form of proportionality review to assess the legality of legislation adopted under Article 14’s limitation clause. The note analyses these changes from a comparative perspective, in light of the difficulties foreign apex courts have had in fully transitioning to a more balancing-friendly approach to rights adjudication. © 2021, National University of Singapore, Faculty of Law. All rights reserved.