After the establishment of Raffles' colony, commerce brought with it Chinese, Indian and other immigrants from SE Asia and beyond. Commerce brings not only new ideas and values, carried by people freed from the traditional constraints of their own cultures,5 but also a motive for legal development: a degree of social stability and law and order is required; guarantees of private property and the honouring of promises; the legitimation and bolstering of institutions. The increase in population too, which in Singapore's case was an essential ingredient of prosperity, requires all these things.
Imperial policy required the introduction of the common law, achieved formally by Charter in 1826,6 and then by the progressive development of legal institutions—courts, judges, lawyers, local legislation, police, and eventually a bureaucracy, taxation, elections to a representative legislature, constitutional government, and political independence.7
The most notable feature of Singapore's legal development during the Lee Kuan Yew era has been the growth of statute law. Of course this is probably true of every country in the world, but in Singapore it has taken a particular form. Statutes have on the whole conferred administrative powers going far beyond what is regarded in most common-law countries as appropriate or necessary, and to the extent that Singapore has developed an indigenous legal system with its own peculiar features, these features are almost exclusively uncommon in the extent to which they regulate social behaviour. The legal system has become, in short, a regulatory system. In this one can contrast the emerging legal systems of other developing countries,8 which, although occasionally embodying laws comparable with Singapore's, have been essentially pluralistic in nature, and attempt to establish a balance of interests, assuming a diverse rather than a monolithic society. It is this divergence of statute law from the standard model one generally finds in common-law countries which marks the autochthony of Singapore's legal system.
The common law, as is forcefully argued by Andrew Phang in a recent and very impressive monograph,9 has been characterized by its lack of development in Singapore. Taking the example of contract law, Phang shows how the judges failed to take a Singaporean view of the subject, simply applying English precedents mechanically, even where the needs of society demanded a different result.10 He refers to the ``emaciation of custom'' and the lack of development of alternative forms of dispute resolution. Much the same can be said of tort law and many other areas of Singapore law. The common law is characterized by its failure to achieve autochthony,11 and, I would argue because of this, there is, in parallel, an atrophy of judicial power.12
On this basis I want to take a brief look, by way of example, at some particular areas of public law in Singapore by way of amplification of the thesis of this paper.