Alizatul Khair binti Osman Khairuddin

On the judicial record

Gathers apex-court decisions settling questions of general importance across housing-development law, native customary rights, banking and civil procedure, where the Federal Court's ruling binds the courts below.

Alizatul Khair binti Osman Khairuddin sits in the Federal Court, the apex court of Malaysia, and this collection gathers final appellate decisions to which she contributed. The subject range is characteristic of the apex court's work: questions of general importance in banking and finance, constitutional law, company and insolvency law, and land. Among the most significant is the housing-development line of appeals concerning purchasers of apartments, in which the Federal Court considered the validity of ministerial power to waive or modify the statutory sale-and-purchase contract prescribed under the Housing Development (Control and Licensing) Act 1966 and its regulations — an issue central to the protection of house buyers against extensions of the delivery period. Land and native rights feature through appeals on declaratory relief and native entitlement over gazetted forest reserve, engaging native law and custom and the powers of the Director of Forests and the Lands and Surveys authorities. Civil-procedure principles are addressed at the highest level, including the consequences of a failure to plead material facts. Banking and finance appeals recur, as do disciplinary appeals from a local-authority disciplinary board and matters concerning the standing and rights of the parties before the lower courts. Because the Federal Court sits in panels and decides points that bind the courts below, these decisions carry weight far beyond their immediate parties: they settle the correct construction of a statute or the proper scope of a power rather than merely resolving the dispute at hand, and they are the authority to which later litigants and the lower courts will return. Private individuals are referred to here by role; corporate, governmental and statutory parties are named. The collection is valuable for showing how a Federal Court judge engages with questions that reach across public and private law — from the constitutional limits on subsidiary legislation and executive power to the pleading rules that govern every civil trial — and for the durable precedents that emerge when the apex court speaks.