Mohd Zawawi bin Salleh

On the judicial record

A Federal Court judge whose reported corpus settles apex-level questions across constitutional law, intellectual property, land and native rights, and sensitive public law.

Justice Mohd Zawawi bin Salleh sits in the Federal Court (Mahkamah Persekutuan), Malaysia's apex court, and the reported decisions in this corpus resolve questions of general importance across constitutional, commercial, land and intellectual-property law. Constitutional law features through a decision on the constitutionality of sections 56 and 57 of the Central Bank of Malaysia Act 2009 — the provisions on references to the Shariah Advisory Council in Islamic-banking disputes — tested against Article 74 of the Federal Constitution, and through administrative-law review of a decision of the Director-General of National Registration on the entry of a father's name in a child's birth register.

Intellectual-property law appears in a significant patent dispute, where the court considered the validity of a patent and the invalidation of an independent claim, alongside trademark and passing-off questions. Land and native-rights law recur, including property held without title under a registered power of attorney, native customary rights over forest land in Sarawak, and whether a successful bidder at a judicial sale under section 204 of the National Land Code must recognise a prior chargee's interest.

The corpus also engages contract and civil procedure — whether a consent judgment may release one party from its mutual obligations without releasing the other — employment law through the 'single economic unit' test for the continuity of an expatriate's employment, and bankruptcy where a money judgment has multiple petitioning creditors. Public-law questions of high sensitivity appear as well, including the discretion of a State Head of State to determine whether a Chief Minister has ceased to command the confidence of the majority, and appellate-procedure questions on the scope of a cross-appeal and whether there was in fact a majority judgment. The decisions reflect an apex-court judge settling foundational points across several fields, where the ruling fixes the governing rule for the courts below rather than merely resolving the immediate dispute. That breadth — from Islamic-banking references to native title to the confidence of a State assembly — is characteristic of the questions that reach the apex court and of the interpretive method the corpus applies to them.