HISTORY OF THE MALAYSIAN CONSTITUTION

A constitutional conference was held in London from 18 January to 6 February 1956 attended by a delegation from the Federation of Malaya, consisting of four representatives of the Rulers, the Chief Minister of the Federation Tunku Abdul Rahman and three other ministers, and also by the British High Commissioner in Malaya and his advisers.

The conference proposed the appointment of an independent commission to devise a constitution for a fully self-governing and independent Federation of Malaya. This proposal was accepted by Queen Elizabeth IIand the Malay Rulers.

Accordingly, the Reid Commission, consisting of constitutional experts from fellow Commonwealth countries and headed by Lord (William) Reid, a distinguished Lord-of-Appeal-in-Ordinary, was appointed by the Queen and the Malay Rulers.

The Constitution of Malaya was drafted based on the advice of the Reid Commission which conducted a study in 1956. The Constitution came into force on 27 August 1957. Formal independence was only achieved on 31 August however.

The constitutional machinery devised to bring the new constitution into force consisted of:

• In the United Kingdom, the Federation of Malaya Independence Act 1957, together with the Orders in Council made under it.
• The Federation of Malaya Agreement 1957 between the government of the United Kingdom and the government of the Federation of Malaya.
• In the Federation, the Federal Constitution Ordinance 1957 by the Parliament.
• In each of the Malay states, state enactments approving and giving force of law to the federal constitution.

The Constitution of Malaya (with significant amendments) was used as the basis for the Constitution of Malaysia when Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak, and Singapore merged to form Malaysia in 1963.

District Court Dismisses Claims in Nationwide Text Messaging Class Action

Text messaging is a booming advanced wireless service. This service for using cellular telephones to send and receive short messages was first introduced by AT&T in 2002 but was quickly launched by other wireless providers. Monthly text messages have soared from 4.7 billion during December 2005, to 9.8 billion during December 2006, all the way up to 48.1 billion in December 2008. In 2008 alone, some one trillion text messages were sent and received. This business has been the target of class-action litigation. But owing to a failure to allege facts sufficient to state a claim of unlawful conspiracy, a recent federal trial court ruling put the brakes on a nationwide class-action antitrust suit alleging collusive per-message price-fixing by all major wireless carriers.

Consumers typically purchase text messaging services either on a per-message basis or through a bundled plan. Bundled plans can include either set allotments of text messages or unlimited amounts. Moreover, since 2005, wireless carriers’ “prices for other wireless services, such as voice calling and data transmission, decreased.” Nonetheless, per-message prices for text messaging have become the target of congressional inquiry and a Department of Justice investigation that recently concluded without any action being taken. But permessage prices are also the subject of a sweeping class action lawsuit: In Re Text Messaging Antitrust Litigation.

Over a dozen separate lawsuits against the four national wireless carriers—AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon—were transferred to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. Plainti? s’ attorneys ? led suit on behalf of “all those who purchased text messaging services on a fee-per-message basis from defendants or their predecessors, subsidiaries, or a? liates from January 1, 2005 to the present.”

At issue in the district court’s December 2009 ruling was the defendants’ Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss the plainti? s’ claims that all four national wireless carriers violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act. Horizontal price-? xing is per se illegal under antitrust law. Plainti? s’ alleged that the defendants colluded to ? x prices for per-message text messaging services.