Bottom line – two old, but accepted rules

If the man at the top of a government is later found never to have held his office, what happens to everything done under him?

Two old rules pull in opposite directions.

One says the fault travels downward and takes everything with it.

The other says the public cannot be expected to check an official’s paperwork before obeying him.

Negeri Sembilan may be about to test which one Malaysia follows. This essay does not say which it should be.

An engineer finds that a building’s foundation permit was never properly issued.

She does not, for that reason alone, order everyone onto the street.

She asks a narrower question first.

Does a fault at the bottom travel up through every floor?

Or does the building stand on its own, until someone with power to condemn it says otherwise?

Lawyers have argued the same thing about public office for well over a century. There is a name on each side.

Two rules, pulling opposite ways

The first is simple.

A power never validly held cannot validly produce anything.

A chain is only as strong as its first link.

Follow it honestly and it reaches a long way. Everything done by a government whose head is later unseated falls with him — appointments, resolutions, directions, the lot.

‘Alang-alang menyeluk pekasam, biar sampai ke pangkal lengan’ (if you are going to reach into the pickle jar, reach right up to the elbow).

The first rule, taken at its word, travels further than most people want to follow.

The second rule exists because of exactly that.

Where a person has openly held a public office and has done its work, and the public had no way of knowing of a fault in his title, courts across the Commonwealth have generally let those acts stand.

The reason is not that the fault stops mattering.

It is that an ordinary citizen who paid a tax, obeyed an order, or relied on a government’s daily business should not pay, years later, for a flaw buried in somebody else’s appointment.

This series has not found a Malaysian case applying that second rule to a state government in circumstances like these, and does not pretend it has.

What is set out above is the general common law position, and it is flagged here as needing a check.

What has actually happened

On 16 and 17 September the State Executive Council resolved that the proclamation against Tuanku Muhriz stood, and in doing so treated a rival, Tuanku Nadzaruddin, as Ruler in his place.¹The Rakyat Post, ‘Negeri Sembilan Throne Dispute Deepens As Exco Recognises Tuanku Nadzaruddin,’ 17 September 2026.

It ordered the proclamation gazetted.²The Star, ‘Negri MB Ismail confirms proclamation against Tuanku Muhriz, says exco decided unanimously,’ 17 September 2026.

Three days earlier, the Dewan Keadilan dan Undang had ruled that Tuanku Muhriz remains the Yang di-Pertuan Besar.³BERNAMA, ‘Tuanku Muhriz Remains Negeri Sembilan Ruler – DKU,’ 17 September 2026.

Those are the acts on the record.

Nothing reported so far shows the State Legislative Assembly sitting, passing a bill, or waiting on royal assent since the quarrel grew.

So the question in the title is about what may come.

It is not a report of what has happened.

That distinction matters, and this essay keeps to it.

Why it still has to be asked

Because a Legislative Assembly cannot run itself.

Somebody must call it, close it, dissolve it when its time comes, and give assent to what it passes.

In the nine states that have Rulers, that somebody is the Ruler.

It is the same architecture the Federal Constitution uses, repeated at state level.

A quarrel about who holds that office cannot live in press statements for ever.

A state still has to pass a budget.

Laws still have to be made, and people still have to be governed while the lawyers argue.

If the Assembly must sit, or a bill must be signed, while two bodies of the same state recognise two different men, the two rules above stop being theory.

They become the only way to answer whether what follows is a working legislature, or nothing at all.

A further tangle

Ismail Lasim is Menteri Besar because he was sworn in before Tuanku Muhriz on 2 August.⁴See 8/NS, ‘Can Two Signatures, Four Months Apart, Remove Negeri’s Ruler?,’ and 9/NS, ‘When Does a Menteri Besar Stop Being One?,’ gkg.legal.

The Dewan Keadilan dan Undang has since confirmed Tuanku Muhriz.

His own Executive Council now treats that same Ruler as ‘displaced’.

Take the first rule, and a government—whose head owes his office to the Ruler it disputes—would have some explaining to do.

Take the second, and none of that disturbs what has already been done.

Which rule governs, and which acts it reaches, is not for this essay to decide.

The Federal Constitution has its own machinery for a state that cannot settle a succession question — Article 71.

Whether a quarrel about removing a sitting Ruler is a succession question at all is another matter, and a later essay takes it up.

The open question

Nothing shows the Assembly of Negeri Sembilan paralysed today.

Nobody has argued in court that it is.

But a state does not stop needing to be governed while a dispute works its way through the courts.

If the Assembly is asked to do anything needing the Ruler’s hand before that dispute ends, Negeri Sembilan will test, in a real case, which of the two rules Malaysian law follows.

So far as this research has found, that question has never had to be answered here.

It is about to be.

∞§∞

This article is for general information only and is not legal or technical advice. Seek independent legal advice where appropriate.

Thanks to KN Geetha, TP Vaani, JN Lheela and Lydia Jaynthi of GK Legal, and Drazen Nesic of Unsplash for the image. Claude (Anthropic) assisted with drafting and Perplexity Pro with fact-checking; the author is solely responsible for all views and errors.

© GK Ganesan Kasinathan. All rights reserved. No part of this site’s content may be used without prior written permission: gk@gkganesan.com.