Gregory Das

On the court record

Gregory Das appears in the corpus in civil and commercial litigation and in significant public-law work, argued in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). One High Court matter, appearing for the defendant, turned on the burden of proof under section 101 of the Evidence Act 1950 — the principle that whoever asks a court to give judgment on a legal right dependent on the existence of facts must prove those facts — in a dispute against a development company. A second matter, appearing for the plaintiff, was a tenancy dispute in which the questions were whether a tenancy had been renewed on expiry by inference from the conduct of the parties, whether it was subsequently terminated, whether vacant possession had been delivered in accordance with the contract, whether a claim for double rental was justified where possession had not been delivered to the landlord's satisfaction, and whether the deposit could be applied against outstanding rent or late-payment charges unilaterally imposed. A third matter, in the Court of Appeal and appearing for the appellant, was a judicial review of considerable constitutional importance brought by Bar Malaysia against the Attorney General, concerning the exercise of prosecutorial discretion under Article 145(3) of the Federal Constitution and a discharge not amounting to an acquittal under section 254 of the Criminal Procedure Code; the appeal engaged the threshold for leave, the requirement of a prima facie case, and the principle that intervention is confined to appropriate, rare and exceptional cases. The judicial review is the most consequential of the three, because it tests whether the courts may examine a decision to discharge an accused without an acquittal — a decision that lies at the heart of the constitutional discretion to institute and discontinue criminal proceedings — and it does so at the demanding leave stage where the applicant must show a prima facie case fit for fuller argument. Across the appearances the practice combines the evidentiary and contractual staples of commercial litigation with appellate public-law argument about the reviewability of prosecutorial decisions.