Before I met CS Lim, I would click naturally and immediately with the people that eventually became my close friends; our conversations, though the first, would feel familiar, comforting and engaging. Friendships bloom easily in such soil. He was the first amongst my friends to whom I took an instant and potent dislike to when we first met. We stayed in halls in our first year of university in England. I stayed in the block …
I once had a dilemma; it was when I conducted a criminal appeal in the Court of Appeal. It was for a charge of drug trafficking, an offence punishable with death by hanging. The appellant (a person appealing against a decision) was caught when he arrived at the Kuala Lumpur International airport after flying in from an African country. The police officers arrested him after he cleared passport control because he behaved suspiciously. He arrived …
When I was fourteen, my father passed me a draft essay he wrote; he was entertaining the thought of submitting it to the News Straits Times. Even though I was regularly reading books then I lacked sophistication or depth in my reading. I read books but I was not a reader of books. There was no nuance or refinement to my reading; I simply chased through pages to know what happened. At the time, I …
A second year law student once asked me in an email interview, If you did not want to hire me, what could I do to change your mind? That question ended up proving interesting in the answering. I immediately typed, I don’t know, but it would have to be very persuasive. I was about to leave it at that when suddenly the answer stole upon me; it was my own lawyer, Ameerul Aizat, who answered …
My good friend Shan and I were once at a post-hearing meal in the company of a very senior and well known lawyer. Shop talk was inevitable since we were lawyers; inevitably, I suppose, we got around to the topic of legal consultation fees. “If they cannot pay my consultation fee, I will not advise them. I will not even see them. That is a rule won from hard experience,” the senior lawyer said before …