Clarice Chan

On the court record

Clarice Chan appears in the corpus in native customary rights litigation from Sarawak, argued in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) across a set of related appeals decided together. The dispute concerned a claim to native customary rights, or NCR, brought by a plaintiff on behalf of himself and his siblings against the state land authorities — the Superintendent of Land & Survey, Limbang Division, the State Government of Sarawak, and the Land Custody and Development Authority. The appeals, in which Clarice Chan appeared as appellant in one and as respondent in the others, raised a common cluster of questions that recur throughout NCR jurisprudence: whether the native customary right had in fact been proven by the claimant; whether the map tendered by the claimant to delineate the claimed area should be given evidential weight; whether the High Court had given inadequate reasons such as to warrant appellate interference with its findings; and, importantly, whether a prior alienation of the land by the State extinguished any native customary right and thereby barred rectification of the title. These issues sit at the heart of the tension between customary occupation and use of land on the one hand, and the statutory land-administration and titling system on the other — a question of proof and of legal effect that Sarawak's appellate courts return to repeatedly. Because the three appeals arose from the same underlying subject matter and were heard together, they show a single NCR contest fought on multiple procedural fronts, with the claimant's community interest ranged against the land authorities and the development body. The profile is that of an appellate advocate engaged in one of the most distinctive and consequential areas of East Malaysian land law, where the evidential burden of establishing customary right and the legal significance of state alienation are decisive.