Hasnah Dato' Mohammed Hashim

On the judicial record

Shows an apex- and appellate-level judge engaging with citizenship and constitutional protection, the mental element of murder under section 300(c) of the Penal Code, the boundaries of defamation, and trade-mark law.

Hasnah Dato' Mohammed Hashim appears in this collection sitting in the Federal Court and the Court of Appeal, and the docket reaches across constitutional, criminal, commercial and intellectual-property law at the highest levels. Constitutional and citizenship questions are prominent, including an appeal on citizenship by operation of law for children, engaging the competing principles of jus soli and jus sanguinis. Criminal law features through murder under clause (c) of section 300 of the Penal Code and whether it is necessary to prove that the accused intended to cause the particular injury inflicted, and through preventive-detention challenges under section 4 of the Prevention of Crime Act 1959 and delay in submitting an investigation report. Intellectual property appears in a trade-mark infringement and passing-off appeal between two food manufacturers. Defamation is addressed in a significant media appeal examining whether reportage is in law a separate defence from qualified privilege or the Reynolds defence of responsible journalism. Land-acquisition appeals engage the Land Acquisition Act 1960, and banking, contract and estate-land disputes round out the range, including the illegality of contracts. Because the Federal Court and Court of Appeal sit in panels and their rulings bind or guide the courts below, these decisions settle points of general importance — the mental element of murder, the reach of citizenship law, the scope of a defamation defence — rather than merely resolving the dispute at hand. Private individuals are referred to by role; corporate, governmental, media and institutional parties are named. Taken together the appeals show a judge moving comfortably between the individual-rights end of the spectrum — citizenship, liberty, free expression — and the commercial end of trade marks, contracts and land, applying to each the discipline of close statutory and doctrinal analysis. The collection is valuable for showing how an apex- and appellate-level judge engages with constitutional protection, the criminal law of homicide, the boundaries of free expression in defamation, and the commercial law of trade marks and contracts.