Nanyang Siang Pau
During his tenure, he prepared many legal opinions on important constitutional and administrative law issues. He was also the Government's lead counsel in a number of notable cases, including "Lee Mau Seng v. Minister for Home Affairs" (1971), which involved four executives of the "Nanyang Siang Pau" ("South Seas Business Newspaper"), a Chinese-language newspaper, who had been detained without trial under the Internal Security Act ("ISA") for "glamorising communism and stirring up communal and chauvinistic sentiments over Chinese language, education and culture". Upon an application by the detainees for "habeas corpus", the High Court held that the President, when acting on Cabinet's advice to detain a person under the ISA, exercises a subjective discretion as to whether the person is a risk to national security, which is not justiciable by the courts. Although the judgment was later disapproved by the Court of Appeal in "Chng Suan Tze v. Minister for Home Affairs" (1988), in 1989 Parliament amended the Constitution and the ISA to "freeze" the law relating to detentions under the Act to that applying in Singapore on the date when "Lee Mau Seng" was decided.