Kamaruzaman Arif & Sofiah

On the court record

Kamaruzaman Arif & Sofiah is a Malaysian firm whose reported matters before the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) are concentrated in administrative and public law, land development and civil procedure. A significant line of work is judicial review of local-authority and administrative decisions. The firm has appeared in a judicial review to quash a local authority's decision to demolish stalls occupied by unlicensed traders, raising the doctrine of legitimate expectation, and in a challenge under section 16 of the Local Government Act 1967 to the appointment of a secretary to a position while the applicant was still incumbent, which raised whether that amounted to a demotion and whether the right to be heard had been accorded. It has also appeared, at the Court of Appeal, in a matter on the jurisdiction of the Syariah High Court and whether a renunciation-of-religion case falls within that jurisdiction, engaging the Administration of the Religion of Islam (State of Selangor) Enactment 2003.

The firm's commercial and land work includes a full-trial dispute arising after a development-rights agreement for a proposed land-development project failed to be concluded, and joint-venture disputes over the alleged expiry or termination of a development agreement, the legitimate expectation to develop the land, and allegations of fraud, where the court dismissed the claim on finding no breach and no fraud proved. It has also argued combined applications under Orders 14 and 18 of the Rules of Court 2012 engaging the maxim ex turpi causa non oritur actio where a party had operated without a valid licence. In the licensing dispute the firm invoked the maxim ex turpi causa non oritur actio where a party had operated without a valid licence, resisting a claim founded on an arrangement tainted by that illegality. The reported profile is that of a practice combining public-law judicial review with land-development and civil-procedure litigation, engaged with the fairness of administrative decisions and the enforceability of development agreements.