Mohamed Musthafa (MA-17C-19-05/2026)

This is a master's application under section 36(2) of the Legal Profession Act 1976 ("the Act"). The applicant, Mohamed Musthafa, seeks an order permitting his pupil to appear during her pupillage, on his behalf and on behalf of his firm, within the limits prescribed by that section. An order of that kind is known to the profession as a short call. The pupil is Saraswathy a/p Mahalingam, who reads in the applicant's chambers at Tetuan Mohamed Musthafa & Co, No. 35-A, Jalan Merdeka, Taman Melaka Raya, 75000 Melaka. The application is unopposed.

The pupil has petitioned for admission as an advocate and solicitor of the High Court in Malaya under sections 10 and 15 of the Act. That petition, No. WA-18-980-05/2026, was filed in the High Court at Kuala Lumpur on 6 May 2026. The present application is the means by which, during the pupillage, the pupil is granted the limited and supervised audience that section 36(2) allows. It falls to be decided under the Act as amended by the Legal Profession (Amendment) Act 2025 [Act A1755], which came into operation on 9 May 2025. As will appear, that amendment has altered not the test the Court applies, but the consequence of the order the Court makes.

The orderly course is to begin with what section 36 requires of the Court: to identify the matters of which the Court must be satisfied, and then to measure the application against them. I take the material provisions in turn.

Section 36(2), as amended, empowers a Judge to make the order on the application of a master, made in Chambers within thirty days from the commencement of the pupillage. The order permits the pupil to appear on behalf of the master, or of the firm or limited liability law partnership in which he practises. The audience it allows is graduated. For the first three months from the date of the order, the pupil may appear in Chambers before a Judge or Registrar of the High Court, before a Sessions Court Judge or Magistrate, and before a Registrar of the Subordinate Courts, for the limited purposes the paragraph specifies. After those three months, she may appear in Chambers in the High Court and the subordinate courts to conduct any cause or matter, and before any Magistrate to conduct any cause, matter or trial.

Two further provisions fix the timing. By section 36(4), the period of pupillage begins on the date the petition referred to in section 15(5) is filed, and the thirty days run from that date. By section 36(2A), inserted by Act A1755, an application made after the thirty days is not permitted save with the leave of the court. The change is plain when set against the former words. The application was once to be made "at the commencement of the pupillage". That formula fixed the starting event but set no outer limit, so that an application might be brought at any time while the pupillage continued. The amendment has closed that latitude. The step must now be taken within thirty days — within the first month of commencement, and a later application is not competent save by leave.

The reasons for confining the time are readily apparent. The order is the first occasion on which the master and pupil come under the eye of the Court. To require it at the outset ensures that the pupil's supervised audience is sanctioned before it is exercised, rather than regularised afterwards. The limit also answers to the order's new place in the scheme. Because the order must now be exhibited in support of the petition for admission, an early deadline ensures that it is in hand, and in order, well before the petition is heard. It guards, too, against a pupil completing her pupillage only to find that she lacks the order which section 11(1)(e) has made indispensable to her admission. And a fixed period ends the uncertainty of the former words, under which an application might be deferred until late in the pupillage, or until audience had already been exercised. The leave reserved by section 36(2A) keeps a door open for the deserving case of delay, but lateness is now the exception. The provision is to be read so as to advance that purpose, in keeping with the approach to construction affirmed in Palm Oil Research and Development Board Malaysia & Anor v Premium Vegetable Oils Sdn Bhd [2005] 3 MLJ 97.

Section 36(3) is the source of the Court's duty. It provides that the Judge shall make the order if he thinks it "fair and reasonable" to do so, provided always that both the Bar Council and the State Bar Committee have been served and have had an opportunity to be heard. Two things follow. The first is a mandatory precondition: that the two professional bodies have been served and given the opportunity to be heard. The second is the standard by which the discretion is exercised what is fair and reasonable. The word "shall" does not reduce the Court to a ministerial role. The standard calls for judicial evaluation, and the absence of opposition, though material, is no substitute for the Court's own satisfaction that the order should be made. C. THE EFFECT OF THE 2025 AMENDMENTS

Those requirements are not altered by the 2025 amendments. What the amendments change is the place of the order within the scheme of the Act, and that change must be understood, for it bears on the weight of the exercise and on the manner in which it is approached. Before Act A1755, an order under section 36(2) was a permission and no more. It allowed a pupil to appear, within strict limits and under her master's supervision, while she learned her profession, and it looked no further than the pupillage. The amendment has given it a longer reach. By section 11(1)(e), obtaining the order is now a qualification for admission; by section 15(3)(h), a true copy of it must be exhibited in support of the admission petition. What was a convenience of pupillage has become a condition of admission. On the face of the Act, a qualified person who has not obtained the order cannot be admitted,however faithfully she has served her time.

The order therefore now carries a double aspect. It remains what it has always been: an order regulating the limited and supervised audience of a pupil, open under section 36(5) to variation or rescission, at the instance of the master or the professional bodies, as the interest of the profession may require. It has become, in addition, a documented precondition of admission. The two aspects sit together without strain, for in each the order is constitutive, not declaratory. Until it is made, the pupil is, by section 36(1), an unauthorised person, and her right to appear is born of the order and of nothing else. The amendment has simply added a second consequence to the making of the order: it now opens the door not only to the courtroom during pupillage, but in time to the Roll.

It follows that the obtaining of the order, once a matter of practice, is now in substance compulsory. Under the Act as it formerly stood, the qualifications for admission were exhausted by section 11(1)(a) to (d): age, good character, citizenship or permanent residence, and the satisfactory service of pupillage. The short call found no place among them. A pupil might serve her nine months, earn her master's certificate of diligence, and be admitted to the Roll without any order under section 36(2) ever having been sought; the supervised audience the order conferred was a convenience of training, useful but not indispensable, and many a pupil passed through her pupillage without it. Act A1755 has put an end to that latitude. By adding paragraph (e) to section 11(1) — "has obtained an order under subsection 36(2)" — and by requiring, under section 15(3)(h), that a true copy of the order be exhibited in support of the petition, the legislature has made the order a sine qua non of admission. The pupil who would be admitted must now obtain it. To that extent, and in that sense, the short call is no longer optional but mandatory.

That said, it is necessary to be exact about where the compulsion lies, for the point is easily overstated. What Act A1755 has made indispensable is the pupil's obtaining of the order, not the Court's granting of it. The verb in section 36(2) remains permissive a Judge "may" make the order and section 36(3) commands its making only where the Judge thinks it fair and reasonable to do so. The amendment has not converted that evaluative discretion into a duty to grant, nor reduced the application to a formality to be rubber-stamped because admission now depends upon it. The two propositions must be held apart. The pupil must obtain the order if she is to be admitted; but she obtains it only if the statutory test is met. Far from diminishing the Court's task, that is what gives it weight. Because the order has become the gateway it now is, a grant made without scrutiny would let an unmerited applicant through a door the legislature has placed in her path, and a refusal rightly made will, in the ordinary case, arrest the progress to admission of one who ought not to advance. The mandatory character of the order at the admission stage is therefore the very reason for, and not a reason against, the care with which the discretion at this stage must be exercised.

The purpose served by elevating the order to a condition of admission is not obscure, and it is worth stating, for it informs the care the section now demands. Pupillage is the practical apprenticeship that the Act interposes between academic qualification and admission, and its object is to produce a practitioner fit to be entrusted with the conduct of causes in the courts. The order under section 36(2) is the sole means by which, during that apprenticeship, the pupil is brought into court to exercise audience under supervision; it is the bridge between learning the law and practising it. Under the former law, because the order was optional, a pupil might be admitted upon a pupillage served wholly within chambers, never having appeared before a court under her master's eye. The amendment closes that gap. By making the order indispensable to admission, the legislature has ensured that no person is enrolled who has not passed through the discipline of supervised appearance that every entrant to the Roll has had her practical advocacy tested in court, and not merely her diligence certified in chambers. The requirement secures, in addition, that the early checkpoint the section provides the one occasion on which master and pupil come before the Court and the professional bodies at the outset of the pupillage becomes a universal incident of the path to admission, rather than a step which the diligent take and the negligent omit. And by requiring the sealed order to be exhibited under section 15(3)(h), it furnishes the admission court with documentary assurance that supervised audience was both sanctioned and available to be undertaken. So understood, the amendment is of a piece with the scheme it amends. It raises the practical threshold of admission: court-tested training, secured through the short call, is now a condition of entry to the profession. That is the purpose the requirement serves, and it is why an application of this kind now carries the gravity already described.

It is necessary, however, to be precise about what the amendment has drawn into the admission process. It is the order the sealed product of this application and not the application itself. The amendment has tied the document to the petition; it has not folded this proceeding into that one. Three things demonstrate as much.

First, the order has joined a class of documents that the petition gathers but does not create. Section 15(3) requires the petitioner to exhibit, among other things, two recent certificates of good character and her master's certificate that she has served her pupillage with diligence. Each of these is made outside the petition and merely produced within it. The section 36(2) order, now required by paragraph (h), takes its place among them: it is exhibited in the petition, not litigated there. Secondly, the order must of necessity be obtained long before the petition is ripe. The application is made within thirty days of the commencement of the pupillage, yet the petition cannot be heard until the nine months prescribed by section 12(2) have been served and the certificate of diligence earned. The order is thus in hand for the greater part of the pupillage before the petition is heard. A step taken in the first month, and then laid by to await a hearing so distant, is no interlocutory step within that hearing. Thirdly, the section retains its own architecture. The applicant is the master, not the pupil. The order issues only after the Bar Council and the State Bar Committee have been heard. And it remains, under section 36(5) which Act A1755 left untouched open to variation or rescission on the application of the master or those same professional bodies. The touchstone of that continuing power is, in the words of the subsection, whether the order is in the best interest of the profession. So it was construed in M Puravalen, Re Vazeer Alam Mydin Meera [1991] 2 CLJ 1381; [1991] 3 CLJ (Rep) 645, where Eusoff Chin J held that the power confers a wide discretion governed by that single criterion, and may be invoked only once an order under section 36(2) has been made. That width is not, however, at large. In A Panjaram, Re Lim Soo Lee [1991] 3 CLJ (Rep) 399, Vohrah J declined to follow M Puravalen so far as it might be read to suggest otherwise, holding that a variation under section 36(5) cannot travel beyond the audience that section 36(2) enumerates: the words "best interest of the profession" qualify the power to extend, withdraw or annul the enumerated rights, but cannot conjure a right of appearance the section does not confer. The variation there sought to permit a pupil to appear before a Sessions Court Judge in open court, an audience nowhere found in section 36(2) was for that reason refused. The two decisions are reconciled once it is seen that the discretion is wide in its criterion but confined in its subject; and so understood, Panjaram is of a piece with the constitutive and confined character of the order described in these grounds. These are the marks of a supervisory jurisdiction over practice and audience, exercised in the interest of the profession not of an adjudication upon the pupil's eventual right to be admitted.

That character is confirmed in two further ways. The first is the location of the section within the Act. The qualifications for admission, and the machinery of pupillage and petition, are gathered in Part II, among the provisions on "Qualified Persons". Section 36 is not there. It stands in Part IV, "Privileges of Advocates and Solicitors", among the sections governing the right to practise, rights of audience, and unauthorised practice. Act A1755 might have moved the short-call power into Part II and made it a true incident of admission. It did not. It connected only the order to the admission process, and left the power where it stood. The second, and the more telling, is the identity of those whom the Act requires to be consulted, which differs at the two stages. At admission, section 16(1) requires the petition and its supporting documents to be served on the Attorney General, as well as on the Bar Council and the State Bar Committee. At the short-call stage there is no such breadth. Section 36(3) requires only the Bar Council and the State Bar Committee to be heard, and section 36(5) confines the continuing power of variation or rescission to the master and those same two bodies. The Attorney General has no part in the section 36 jurisdiction at all an absence to which I return.

It helps to be clear about what is supervised at this stage. The order gives the pupil no right of her own. The audience it allows is the master's, lent to her for a season. She appears on his behalf and under his supervision, and he answers to the Court for the manner in which she conducts any cause. In making the order, therefore, the Court does not pass upon the pupil's status or her fitness for the Roll. It sanctions a "controlled loan" of a practising advocate's audience to the pupil he is training, within fixed limits and for a fixed purpose. The supervision is provisional and forward-looking. It governs how the pupil learns her craft in court during the pupillage, and no more. What the section commits to the Court's oversight — and, under section 36(5), to the professional bodies' — is the genuineness of that training, the master's fitness to conduct it, and the confinement of the privilege to its limits. The pupil is thus the hand, not the principal: being by section 36(1) an unauthorised person, she has no audience of her own, and the order does not confer audience upon her but authorises her to exercise — as the master's, and in his name — the audience that belongs to him. That is why the order runs "on behalf of the Master or of the firm", why the master alone may apply for it, and why he, and not the pupil, answers to the Court for the conduct of any cause in which the audience is used. The supervisory thread is never cut: at no point does the pupil step out from under the master's responsibility and practise in her own right. Each strand of this analysis has the support of authority. That there is no inherent right to practise law, and that the audience and other privileges of an advocate and solicitor are the creatures of Part IV of the Act alone, the Federal Court affirmed in Darshan Singh Khaira v Majlis Peguam Malaysia [2021] 10 CLJ 497, holding that a person who is not qualified is an unauthorised person within section 36 whose acting as an advocate and solicitor is an offence under section 37; the pupil stands on that unauthorised side of the line save to the extent the order lends her the master's audience. And the strictness with which that lent audience is confined to the master and his firm is borne out by OCBC Bank (M) Bhd v CTK Enterprise Sdn Bhd [2000] 6 CLJ 158, where, a pupil of one firm having sought to appear on behalf of another, PS Gill J held that on a plain reading of section 36(2) a pupil is forbidden to appear for anyone but his master or the firm in which the master practises, and exhorted those who take pupils in chambers to abide strictly by the provision.

It is this character of the privilege — audience lent, not owned that makes the power of variation and rescission under section 36(5) both intelligible and apt. A right that is lent may be recalled; and section 36(5) is the means of recall. Because the pupil holds nothing of her own, the order may be varied or rescinded without depriving her of any vested right, and the subsection accordingly fixes a single and undemanding touchstone for its exercise: what, in all the circumstances, is in the best interest of the profession. The standing to invoke it answers to the same logic. The application lies to the master, who may wish to bring the arrangement to an end because the pupillage has come to an end, or he has ceased to practise, or the loan is no longer apt and to the Bar Council and the State Bar Committee, the bodies charged with the regulation of practice and audience, who may move to recall the privilege if it is abused, if the pupillage is shown to be nominal, or if the pupil ought no longer to exercise the audience the order allows. The Attorney General has no place here, for no question of admission or of public status arises; what is in issue is the profession's control of its own audience. As already noticed, the power under section 36(5) presupposes an order under section 36(2) and operates only once one has been made: it is a power of recall, not of origination.

So understood, section 36(5) supplies the counterpoise to the heightened consequence that Act A1755 has attached to the order. The amendment has made the order a passport to admission, yet it left section 36(5) deliberately untouched. The two sit together as design, not accident. The privilege, though it now opens the way to the Roll, remains a lent and recallable thing up to the moment of admission; and should the foundation on which it rests fall away before then should the pupillage prove hollow, the supervision illusory, or the privilege be turned to improper use the master or the professional bodies may apply under section 36(5), and an order so varied or rescinded will no longer stand as the true copy that section 15(3)(h) requires the petition to carry. The recall power is thus not merely a tool for managing the pupil's audience in court; it is, under the amended scheme, a safeguard of the integrity of the admission gateway itself. That the legislature heightened the order's effect while preserving the means of its recall is a measure of the coherence of the scheme: the greater the door the order opens, the more it matters that the privilege behind it can be withdrawn if it ceases to be deserved.

This explains the Attorney General's absence. His concern is with admission, not with the short call. At admission the pupil seeks a public status that of an advocate and solicitor, an officer of the Court, with general rights of audience and a practising certificate in her own name. The State has a proper voice in that, which section 16(1) and his right to object to the petition secure. The short call confers no such status. The pupil remains, by section 36(1), an unauthorised person but for the narrow audience the order allows; nothing is added to the Roll, and she exercises no office of her own. What the short call does engage the conduct of the pupillage, the standing of the master, the fitness of permitting supervised audience now falls to the Bar Council and the State Bar Committee, the bodies the Act charges with the regulation of practice and the oversight of those in training. The Attorney General's voice is therefore reserved for the gateway where it tells, which is admission. His absence from section 36 is no gap in the section; it is a measure of its subject.

If the Attorney General's voice is reserved for admission, the burden of scrutiny at the short-call stage falls upon the Bar Council and the State Bar Committee; and the amendment has heightened the consequence of that scrutiny. Two aspects of their role may be stated. First, at the stage of the application itself, they are the only bodies the Act entitles to be served and heard under section 36(3). While the order was a permission of limited reach, their opportunity to be heard guarded little; now that the order conditions admission, their scrutiny is the profession's first filter against an application that is unmerited or that rests upon a pupillage in name only. The duty this casts is not formal. It is to attend to the application with care, to satisfy themselves of the genuineness of the pupillage and the fitness of the master, and, where concern arises, to place it before the Court by objection rather than to let the stage pass unexamined. The State Bar Committee of the State in which the pupillage is served, having the closest knowledge of the chambers and the master, is the better placed of the two to perform that office. Secondly, the same bodies share with the master, under section 36(5), the standing to apply for the variation or rescission of the order; and that continuing power, exercised in the best interest of the profession, is now also the means by which they may protect the integrity of the admission gateway should the pupillage prove hollow or the privilege be abused after the order is made. So understood, the part the professional bodies play at the short-call stage is no longer a formality but a real safeguard. Their duty is the protection of the profession and of the public it serves; and because the order now conditions admission, the faithful discharge of that duty — by careful scrutiny of the application, by objection where it is warranted, and, where necessary, by resort to section 36(5) — is a matter of real importance.

It remains to ask where, in all this, the interest of the pupil lies, and how it is protected; for it is her training, and, since the amendment, her very admission, that the order touches most nearly. The Act does not make her a party. The applicant is the master, and the standing to seek variation or rescission under section 36(5) is given to the master and the professional bodies, not to her. Her interest is protected, therefore, not by a voice of her own but through the structure the section builds about her. It is protected, first, by the master, who applies for the order on her behalf and for her benefit, and under whose supervision and answerability she is shielded from bearing personally the consequences of the audience she exercises. It is protected, secondly, by the professional bodies, whose duty in the oversight of those in training runs to her advantage as much as to the profession's. It is protected, thirdly, by the Court, whose inquiry into the genuineness of the pupillage and the fitness of the master exists in no small part to ensure that she is not put to exercise an audience she is not ready for, or under a master unable to guide her. And it is protected, since the amendment, by the time-limit in section 36(2A): by requiring the order to be sought within the first month, with leave reserved for the deserving case of delay, the Act guards her against the hardship of serving out her pupillage only to find the order now indispensable to her admission wanting or out of time. The pupil thus has, and needs, no standing of her own at this stage. Her interest is carried by the master, watched over by the professional bodies, and secured by the Court; and the heightened consequence the amendment has given the order makes that protection matter the more.

This also disposes, shortly, of the one feature of the papers that might give pause. The admission petition was filed in the High Court at Kuala Lumpur, whereas this originating summons was filed here, at Melaka. The divergence raises no question of jurisdiction. There is but one High Court in Malaya (Article 121(1) of the Federal Constitution); the power under section 36(2) is reposed in a Judge; and it may be exercised wherever the Court sits. Nor does it raise any difficulty of practice. Because it is the order, and not this proceeding, that the petition will receive, the application need not be brought in the registry of the petition. As a discrete exercise of the supervisory jurisdiction, its natural home is the State in which the pupillage is served. That is Melaka where the master practises, where the pupil reads, where the audience will be exercised, and where the relevant State Bar Committee, the Melaka Bar Committee, was served. The application was rightly commenced in this Court.

Two consequences follow for this application. The amendment raises the stakes but leaves the test untouched. And it explains why I have begun with the Court's duty under section 36(3), rather than with the petition at Kuala Lumpur: the petition is the order's destination, not its source. The matters that Part II reserves to the court which will hear the petition the petitioner's good character, the diligent service of her pupillage, and the other qualifications for admission are no part of what falls to be decided here, and of them I say nothing. They are for that court, on that day. What falls to this Court is narrower and earlier. It reduces to three questions: whether the application was made within the thirty days that section 36(2) allows, so that no question of leave under section 36(2A) arises; whether the Bar Council and the State Bar Committee have been served and given the opportunity to be heard that section 36(3) makes a precondition; and whether, on the evidence, it is fair and reasonable to make the order. No other matter is in dispute. I take them in turn. D. WHETHER THE STATUTORY REQUIREMENTS ARE SATISFIED

THE APPLICATION WAS MADE WITHIN TIME [24] The period of pupillage began, by force of section 36(4), on the date the admission petition was filed, namely 6 May 2026. The affidavits of the master (Enclosure 2) and of the pupil (Enclosure 3), each affirmed on 12 May 2026, depose to commencement on that date. This originating summons (Enclosure 1) was filed in this Court on 12 May 2026, six days later. The application was therefore made well within the thirty days that section 36(2) prescribes, and the leave for which section 36(2A) provides does not arise. No question arises, on these facts, as to the consequence of a late application made without leave, and I say nothing of it.

(ii) SERVICE ON, AND THE OPPORTUNITY TO BE HEARD OF THE BAR COUNCIL AND THE STATE BAR COMMITTEE [25] The precondition in section 36(3) is service on, and an opportunity to be heard for, the Bar Council and the State Bar Committee, and those two bodies alone. The Attorney General is not among them. Section 16(1) requires service on him at the admission stage; section 36(3) does not, and the want of service on him would not touch the validity of a short-call application. The affidavit of service affirmed by the pupil on 25 May 2026 (Enclosure 5) shows that the originating summons and the supporting affidavits were served that day, by electronic means, on the Bar Council and on the Melaka Bar Committee, being the State Bar Committee of the State in which the pupillage is served. Each acknowledged receipt the same day. The applicant went further than the section required and served the Attorney General's Chambers as well; its electronic service acknowledged receipt on the same date. That further service was unnecessary to satisfy section 36(3), but it was prudent and is in no way objectionable. Having been served on 25 May 2026, with the matter fixed for hearing on 15 June 2026, the two bodies the section names had ample opportunity to be heard. Both appeared and raised no objection before the Court. The precondition is satisfied. I add that the applicant's service on the Attorney General appears to follow the standard form used in applications of this kind, which is itself directed to the Attorney General. The form thus calls for a step that section 36 does not require, and I shall return to the state of the standard forms, by way of observation, after the orders.

(iii) WHETHER IT IS FAIR AND REASONABLE TO MAKE THE ORDER [26] Before turning to the facts, it is right to state what the inquiry under section 36(3) is, and what it is not the more so since the 2025 amendments. The standard what is fair and reasonable — is evaluative and discretionary. It is not a checklist mechanically applied, and it is not satisfied by the mere absence of objection. The matters that bear upon it, in an ordinary application of this kind, are these. First, the reality of the pupillage: that the pupil is truly reading in the master's chambers and receiving the instruction pupillage exists to give, the order being incident to a genuine pupillage and not a nominal one. Secondly, the standing and fitness of the master: that he meets the requirement of section 13(1) of not less than seven years in active practice and remains in practice, since the audience is exercised on his behalf and under his supervision, and he answers to the Court for the pupil's conduct of any cause. Thirdly, the eligibility of the pupil: that she is a qualified person under the Act and that nothing on the papers tells against the grant. Fourthly, the position of the professional bodies: whether the Bar Council or the State Bar Committee, having been heard, support, oppose, or are silent — a consideration of weight, though never decisive of the Court's own judgment. Fifthly, the scope of the order: that it is confined to the audience section 36(2) allows and reaches no further. And sixthly, the interest of the profession and of the administration of justice: whether the grant advances the training of a competent advocate, and whether any countervailing concern appears. [27] The 2025 amendments do not lengthen that list, but they raise what turns upon it. Because the order is now a qualification for admission under section 11(1)(e), and must be exhibited under section 15(3)(h) in support of the petition, it is no longer the light administrative permission it once was. It is a gateway the pupil must pass before she can be admitted at all. The Court therefore approaches it with corresponding care, and does not grant it as of course. But care is not enlargement. The amendment does not draw into section 36(3) the matters the admission court will decide. The pupil's good character, and the diligence of her pupillage, are to be proved before that court, on the certificates and evidence that section 15(3) requires. They are not for decision here. The inquiry at this stage remains into the propriety of conferring supervised audience now heightened in consequence, but unchanged in compass. It is convenient, therefore, to state as guidance, and not as a rigid code the matters to which the Court will ordinarily look. [28] As to the reality of the pupillage, the first of the considerations identified above, the Court does not try the question as on an issue joined, nor does it look for proof beyond what an unopposed application of this kind can yield. What it looks for is sufficient assurance, on the affidavits and the documents, that a genuine pupillage underlies the application and that the order is sought to serve it. Several matters bear upon that assurance, none decisive alone and all to be weighed together. There should be the concurrent evidence of master and pupil, each on affidavit, deposing to the fact of the pupillage, the date of its commencement, the chambers in which it is read, and the nature of the instruction given and received. The date of commencement should accord with section 36(4) the filing of the petition under section 15(5) so that the affidavit evidence and the court record speak with one voice, as the petition number and date of filing allow the Court to verify. The master must be shown to be in active practice and able in fact to supervise, so that the pupillage is a true reading in working chambers and not a name lent to a register. The pupillage should be consistent with section 12(3), which forbids the pupil, without the written leave of the Bar Council, to hold any office or engage in any employment during her pupillage; a pupillage said to be served alongside undisclosed full-time employment elsewhere may be no genuine pupillage at all. And the pupillage should ordinarily be served in the State in which the audience is to be exercised and in which the application is brought, so that the State Bar Committee with the closest knowledge of it is the one before the Court. These are indicia, not elements; their office is to enable the Court to be satisfied that the relationship the order presupposes is real and current. [29] As to securing that the privilege, once granted, is genuinely undertaken and kept within its bounds that the short call is what it purports to be and not a licence at large the Court's principal instruments are the terms of its own order and the continuing supervision the section provides. The order should in terms confine the audience to the limits of section 36(2), graduated as that section graduates it, and should record that the audience is exercisable only on behalf of the master or his firm and under the master's supervision, he remaining answerable to the Court for its exercise. It is convenient that the order state expressly that it endures only during the subsistence of the pupillage and lapses upon the completion or termination of the pupillage, or upon the pupil's admission, whichever first occurs, so that the privilege cannot outlive the relationship that alone justifies it. The order should record that it remains subject to variation or rescission under section 36(5), by which the master or the professional bodies may bring the matter back before the Court if the privilege is misused or the pupillage falters. And where the material leaves the Court in doubt whether the pupillage is genuine or the supervision real, it is open to the Court rather than to refuse outright to require further evidence, to seek an undertaking from the master as to the supervision he will give, or to stand the application over for the Bar Council or the State Bar Committee to make the inquiries that section 36(3) gives them the opportunity to make. The protection of the privilege lies less in any single condition than in the combination of a tightly drawn order, the master's answerability, and the professional bodies' continuing oversight. [30] Beyond the genuineness of the pupillage and the proper exercise of the privilege, three further matters may, in an appropriate case, bear upon what is fair and reasonable under section 36(3), and are noted for completeness. The first is the bona fides of the application: that it is brought to enable genuine training, and not as a device to clothe one who is not truly a pupil with a right of audience, or to circumvent the prohibition in section 37 upon unauthorised practice. The second is the master's own standing beyond the seven years section 13(1) requires: that he holds a valid practising certificate and is under no disqualification under section 30, for an audience exercised on behalf of a master who is himself disabled from practice would be no proper audience at all. The third is the pupil's eligibility to receive the privilege now: that she is a qualified person within the meaning of the Act, and that nothing apparent on the papers tells against the present grant a matter to be kept distinct, as already explained, from the good character and diligence which are for the admission court alone. These considerations, with those stated above, are not a code to be applied point by point, and no one of them is a condition precedent the absence of which is fatal. They are aids to the single evaluative judgment the section commits to the Court whether, in all the circumstances, it is fair and reasonable that the order be made and are offered as guidance for the ordinary case, to be applied with the flexibility that a beneficial and ordinarily unopposed jurisdiction of this kind requires. [31] Measured against those considerations, the application is well made out, and the evidence is unchallenged. The master deposes, and it is not disputed, that he is an advocate and solicitor of the High Court in Malaya who has been in active practice in Malaysia for a continuous period exceeding the seven years that section 13(1) requires of the advocate and solicitor with whom a pupil serves. That is no formality here: the audience sought is exercisable only under his supervision, so his standing and continuing practice are themselves conditions of it. The pupil is a qualified person under the Act, holding a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, and reads in the master's chambers. Her pupillage, of the nine months prescribed by section 12(2), began on 6 May 2026 and subsists, so the relationship the order presupposes is real and current. The order sought is confined to the limits of section 36(2) and authorises no general practice. Nothing in the material suggests that the grant would be contrary to the interest of the profession or of the administration of justice, and the professional bodies, though heard, have raised nothing against it. [32] In those circumstances, I am satisfied that it is fair and reasonable to make the order, and I exercise the discretion conferred by section 36(2), read with section 36(3), in favour of granting it. E. ORDERS [33] For these reasons, I made the following orders:

pursuant to section 36(2)(a) of the Act, the pupil Saraswathy a/p Mahalingam (NRIC No. 011224-04- 0268) , reading in the chambers of the applicant, is permitted, during the period of three months from the date of this order, to appear on behalf of the applicant or of Tetuan Mohamed Musthafa & Co:

before a Judge or a Registrar of the High Court, in Chambers;

before a Sessions Court Judge or a Magistrate, in Chambers; and

before a Registrar of the Subordinate Courts, to mention a case (including entering judgment in default), to apply for bail, or to take a consent judgment or order;

pursuant to section 36(2)(b) of the Act, at the expiration of that period of three months, the pupil is permitted to appear, on behalf of the applicant or the firm:

in Chambers in the High Court and in the subordinate courts, to conduct any cause or matter; and

before any Magistrate, to conduct any cause, matter or trial;

this order is at all times subject to the supervision of the master and to the limits imposed by the Act, and remains subject to variation or rescission under section 36(5);

this order shall continue only during the subsistence of the pupillage, and shall lapse upon the completion or termination of the pupillage, or upon the admission and enrolment of the pupil as an advocate and solicitor of the High Court in Malaya, whichever first occurs; and

there shall be no order as to costs. F. OBSERVATION ON THE STANDARD FORMS [34] I foreshadowed an observation on the standard forms used in applications of this kind. Having examined the cause papers, I make it now not by way of decision, for nothing turns upon it in this application, but for the assistance of those responsible for the forms. The first matter concerns the addressees of the originating process. The Saman Pemula (Borang 3) is, by its printed foot, directed to three: the Attorney General ("Yang Berbahagia, Peguam Negara Malaysia"), the Secretary of the Bar Council, and the Secretary of the Bar Committee. For the reasons given in these grounds, the first of these is, in an application under section 36, unnecessary. The Attorney General has no part in the section 36 jurisdiction: section 36(3) requires service on, and the opportunity to be heard for, the Bar Council and the State Bar Committee alone, and section 36(5) confines the continuing power to the master and those same two bodies. The direction to the Attorney General is a requirement of the admission petition under section 16(1), carried over into a proceeding to which it does not belong. It would, with respect, be of assistance if the form for section 36 applications were amended to omit that first addressee, and if the third were identified, more exactly, as the State Bar Committee of the State in which the pupillage is served here, the Melaka Bar Committee. [35] The second, and the more substantial, matter concerns the relief the form seeks. The prayer in the Saman Pemula reproduces, in its paragraph (b), the text of section 36(2)(b) as it stood before Act A1755: it asks that, at the expiration of the three months, the pupil be permitted to appear in chambers in the High Court and the subordinate courts, and before any Magistrate, to conduct "any cause or matter". But that is no longer what paragraph (b) provides. Act A1755 substituted a new paragraph (b), which separates the two limbs and, before a Magistrate, extends the audience to the conduct of any "cause, matter or trial" adding the conduct of trials, which the former words did not reach. The form, tracking the repealed wording, asks for less than the section now allows. The consequence is visible on the present papers: the order I have made follows the amended paragraph (b), and so admits the pupil, before a Magistrate, to conduct any cause, matter or trial, while the prayer, on its terms, sought only the conduct of a cause or matter. The application being expressly made under section 36(2)(a) and (b), I have read it as invoking the section as it now stands, and have framed the order accordingly; but the form ought to be brought into line with the amended paragraph (b), so that its words do not appear to ask for less than the order grants. A related consequence deserves notice, for orders already made on the form as it stands. Where such an order has been granted in the terms of the old prayer, it confers on the pupil only the conduct of a cause or matter before a Magistrate, and withholds the conduct of trials that the amended paragraph (b) now allows. That omission is not beyond cure. Because the trial limb is an audience that section 36(2) now enumerates, an order so confined may be conformed to the section by a variation under section 36(5) on the application of the master: such a variation extends to the pupil an enumerated right that the order, tracking the repealed words, withheld, and so falls within — and not beyond — the power as confined in A Panjaram, Re Lim Soo Lee [1991] 3 CLJ (Rep) 399. [36] A related point arises on the same prayer. The form permits the pupil to appear "on behalf of the Master or the firm". Act A1755 substituted, for the words "or of the firm", the words "or on behalf of the firm or the limited liability law partnership", so as to accommodate the new vehicle of practice the amendment introduced. Nothing turns upon it here, the master practising in a conventional firm; but the form would be improved by adopting the amended words, so that a master who practises through a limited liability law partnership is not left to alter the printed form by hand. [37] A last matter I mention with more reserve, for it concerns a form that belongs to the admission court and not to this one, but which is before me in evidence as Exhibit "A" to the pupil's affidavit. The petition for admission (Borang 1) recites, as the petitioner's qualifications, only those formerly set out in section 11(1)(a) to (d) age, good character, citizenship, and the satisfactory service of pupillage. It does not aver the further qualification that Act A1755 added as section 11(1)(e), the obtaining of an order under section 36(2); nor does its supporting affidavit exhibit a true copy of that order, as section 15(3)(h) now requires. That is unsurprising on these facts, for the petition was filed on 6 May 2026, before this order was sought, so that the order can only be produced to the admission court in due course, and in good time before that petition is heard. But it shows that the admission forms, too, await amendment to reflect the amended qualifications for admission. These are matters for the rule-makers and for the court that will hear the petition, and I say no more of them than that the forms appear not yet to have caught up with the Act. [38] I would, in short, invite the attention of those responsible for the standard forms to the changes worked by Act A1755, to the end that the forms used in applications under section 36, and in petitions for admission, are conformed to the Act as it now stands. Dated 15 June 2026 (YA Dato' Sri Raja Segaran a/I S. Krishnan) (Judicial Commisioner) High Court Of Malaya Malacca High Court (MELAKA) Lawyer For Applicant: Cik Huwaida binti Mohd Asri Tetuan Mohamed Musthafa & Co. Peguambela dan Peguamcara No.35-A, Jalan Merdeka, Taman Melaka Raya, 75000 Melaka.