Describe how jurors qualify and are selected for service

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Statutory Interpretation Model Answers Explain, the rules judges may use when interpreting Acts of Parliament There are four different rules judges can use when interpreting Acts of Parliament. The literal rule is when judges have to take the natural, ordinary or dictionary meaning of a word or phrase and apply it to the case in hand. This rule leads to absurd and unjust results. The literal rule occurred in LNER V Berriman case. An Act made it a duty to provide a look-out man wherever a railwayman was ‘repairing or relaying’ the track. His employer didn’t provide him with a look-out man and Mr Berriman was killed by a train. Mr Berriman’s widow claimed compensation, but was unsuccessful. The courts applied the literal rule and…show more content…
Another intrinsic aid contained in older statutes is the preamble. In newer Acts this takes the form of an objectives and purposes section at the beginning of the Act. Both can be used by judges to help them in their interpretation of difficult words and phrases. A further intrinsic aid available to judges is the Schedule which appears in addition to the main body of the Act. Sometimes judges refer to the Schedule to help them make sense of the main text and in some cases it is absolutely necessary to help them understand the Act. For example, s2(1) of the Hunting Act 2004 provides that ‘Hunting is exempt if it is within a class specified in Schedule 1’. A final intrinsic aid judge’s use is punctuation. It is now recognised that this has an effect on the meaning of words. Lord Lowry commented in Hanlon v The Law Society (1981) that draftsmen as ‘literate’ people and therefore punctuate their work for specific reason; judges should therefore consider this punctuation when interpreting legislation. Describe external aids to interpretation Extrinsic aids are materials found outside the Act that may be referred to by judges. One such aid is dictionaries, which can be used to find the literal meanings of words and is therefore particularly helpful when applying the literal rule of interpretation. This extrinsic aid was used in the Allen (1872) case where the
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