Report this comment to a moderator

Freshfields on Australia: the A&O way is not for us

The Virtues of the Morphogenetic Field Unifying the Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and Wellington Legal Marketplaces It's always been fascinating to me how certain London-based intellectual virtues have been maintained, refined and preserved with a greater degree of purity by the Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and Wellington marketplaces from a legal point of view. I have always admired how these distant places interconnect to form a morphogenetic field of sorts echoing and taking ideas and legal precepts that originating once in London and Oxbridge, taking them from there. This conceptual transmission band transcends geography and gives these four markets a distinct voice. Additionally, plenty of local knowledge about Asia is enshrined in these walls. But from a practitioner's point of view advising as counsellor in cross-border matters, next to the New York perspective, plus the European-continental, it is the distinct voice of the London legal community reverberated and mirrored oftentimes so capably by the legal profession in Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney and Wellington all at the same time, which proffers a third dimension to looking into things and at closure of legal argument. Each of the BRIC nations either borrows from such distinguishable New York, Paris/Frankfurt and London/Singapore/Hong Kong/ Sydney/ Wellington respective perspectives. This interconnection is embodied in case law that to the date looks to the London High Court, the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary and now, since several months, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom for precedential guidance. Konstantin von Mettenheim is a man with considerable erudition, but even in the recent debate on stealth takeovers in the German home market, pathbreaking precedents were cases from New Zealand (Perry 2003) and Australia [Glencore, 2006] that in their intellectual rigour surpass the quality of the more recent CSX/TCI (2008) decision by a Southern District of New York federal judge.

16-Feb-2010

9:32 am