Overview

Fernando examines important aspects of the drafting of 1957 Federation of Malaya constitution related to the system of governance, division of legislative and executive powers, the conceptualisation of citizenship and the roles of the judiciary and election commission. The book sheds new light on the balances that the Reid Commission sought to embed in the constitution and the historical constitutional debates and discussions which greatly shaped the framing of the new federal constitution between 1956 and 1957. Drawing on historical evidence mainly from declassified primary constitutional documents, it analyses the submissions, debates and discussions among the framers and various interest groups during the drafting of the constitution between 1956 and 1957 to discern more clearly the intentions of the framers on many aspects of governance and distribution of powers embedded in the constitutional provisions. This book reveals more deeply the nature and complexity of the constitutional issues faced by the framers and how they attempted to reach compromises between the various interest groups in Malaya. It is a valuable resource for scholars and academics of Malaysian, Asian and Commonwealth constitutional history as well as those interested in history, law, political science and important aspects of governance and distribution of powers in the system of parliamentary democracy.

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9781032893891

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Joseph M. Fernando was formerly an associate professor at the Department of History at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in the University of Malaya (2000–2018) and taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Malaysian political and constitutional history and the history of modern Southeast Asia. He was a visiting Fulbright Scholar at the Department of History, Harvard University, in 2004/2005, and Chapman Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, in 2004, and is presently an independent researcher. He has authored several books on Malaysian constitutional and political history and published widely in international academic journals.

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