Gary F. Bell

Religious Legal Pluralism Revisited - The Status of the Roman Catholic Church and Her Canon Law in Singapore

By religious legal pluralism we usually mean state-recognised legal pluralism, such as the kind of legal pluralism implemented in Singapore through the Administration of Muslim Law Act. But there is also religious legal pluralism outside State recognition and enforcement. Many religions have very long legal traditions which have survived, often without much support or official recognition by States (Jewish law, for example). In this paper we shall look at one such tradition, the canon law of the Latin Church of the Roman Catholic Church and its implementation by the Church in Singapore, including the establishment of very busy ecclesiastical tribunals in Singapore to administer disputes relating to the possible nullity of religious marriages, for example. The hope is that this example of Canon Law in Singapore will show that there can be very detailed and formal religious laws implemented by formal institutions such as tribunals outside the ambit of

Global Lawyers for a Global City: Legal Education in Singapore

Singapore’s economy is one of the most global and open in the world. The Singapore government has been pushing for a more international legal education for many years, and has opened up Singapore’s legal profession to foreign lawyers and foreign law firms. The goal is to make Singapore a legal hub for legal services in Asia, which explains the need for the law schools to train global lawyers ready to service the region and the world. Singapore is a common law jurisdiction, while most jurisdictions in Asia follow the civil law. The two law schools have indeed transformed the legal education and made it much more international – all students have to take a course on the legal systems of other Asian countries and there are many elective courses with a comparative or international focus. The core curriculum however remains almost entirely common law focused, and there is much to do before the civil law tradition is taught properly, as it should be if Singapore is to become a hub for legal services in Asia.

Codification and Decodification: The State of the Civil and Commercial Codes in Indonesia

Unlike what happened in East Asia where western codes were adopted somewhat voluntarily in order to “modernise” and replace the previous laws, in Indonesia, as in most of Southeast Asia, the codes came through colonisation. There was no need to adapt the codes to local cultures as the locals would be governed by their own law (Islamic Law and the different indigenous adat laws) and the codes would apply in principle only to Europeans and their commercial transactions. Indonesia to this day remains committed to legal pluralism and the codes are therefore only one of the many legal traditions available and applicable to different persons and situations. In fact the civil and commercial codes remain very foreign—to this day, only the Dutch version is official and no version in the Indonesian language has ever been adopted. This leads to a certain weakness in the doctrine and jurisprudence on these codes as very few academics and judges speak Dutch today. This has led to a decodification—the legislator adopts new legislations in Indonesian which take out of the codes whole fields of law such as land law and company law for example. Nonetheless in contract and commercial law, these old codes in Dutch remain the law and the author suggests a few avenues to improve the state of Indonesian civil and commercial law.