Statutory Law

The literal rule is the traditional English approach, if a court follows the literal rule they are complying with the exact words of parliament, thereby upholding the key constitutional principle of parliamentary sovereignty which says the courts cannot challenge what parliament has passed. The purposive approach however seeks to get away from the artificial consideration of language and to instead seek to find the purpose behind the act. However, it does not fit well with the idea of parliamentary sovereignty. The courts have the ability to say what they think Parliament meant rather than just applying the words of an

Statutory interpretation is required where complication and ambiguity arises as to what the section actually provides and to whom is within the provisions. There are numerous occurrences where judges call for statues to be interpreted further in more depth; such as failure of legislation to cover a point, a broad term, drafting

It is often believed that the relationship between certainty and flexibility in judicial precedent has struck a fine line between being necessary and being precarious. The problem is that these two concepts of judicial precedent are seen as working against each other and not in tandem. There is proof, however, that as contrasting as they are on the surface they are actually working together to achieve one common goal.

The court observed that the ‘legal meaning’, i.e. meaning the legislature is taken to have intended, may not correspond to the literal or grammatical meaning. As four justices put

Statutory purpose is a paramount tool in Breyer’s pragmatism. Indeed, it is one of the two tools (the second we will see later) that he has found to be “the most useful” (Yale 12) because it conduces one of pragmatism’s central values: sustaining the work of democracy. Ordinarily, the pragmatist turns to statutory purpose “when statutory language does not clearly answer the question of what the statute means or how it applies” (Breyer 85). However, the majority uses purpose in a slightly different way here. Rather than using it to modify its interpretation of the CSA, the majority uses statutory purpose to analogize it with the AAA: “Just as the [AAA] was designed ‘to control the volume

It is easy to see that the legal factors involved are themselves not perfect. Since the Court is made up of human beings who are similarly imperfect, it is not implausible to suppose that the Court likewise

It is, after all, the “law of the land” and is still used everyday when it comes to the government. Although, I agree that things do change over time, and the founding fathers could not predict what would happen in the future, they did the best job at trying to account for everything. For the things they could not account for, they essentially did, by adding in the ‘elastic clause’, as well as allowing for amendments. In some instances too, I agree there could be room for interpretation, however as a judicial originalist, it should be done “based on the ‘original intent’ of the framers” (88). Hudson describes how “by determining what the words meant to those who chose them and then applying those meanings to the particular issues” it allows for judges to “avoid any accusation that their decisions impose their own values or policy preferences” (90), which is what the judges are suppose to do in the first place. They are unelected, have life tenure, cannot be removed from the bench, and have constant salaries, just to make sure that they can make “unpopular decisions without fear of retribution” (71). If the interpretations are not based on the origin intent, it not only interferes with this idea of the judges, but also allows for the ideas of the Constitution to be entirely lost, which then means we lose our “law of the land”. The Constitution is what we were founded on and has allowed us to make it this far, so why start to interpret its text for something it is not written to

Statutory interpretation is process of interpreting statutes by the judges. The definition of statutes have had very specific words but indeed the judges would still need the statutory interpretation to help them. The reason of this, even how, the words in the statutes are specific but sometimes the words contains ambiguity and vagueness in words. On top of that, each word could give us different meaning. For example, we can find in the Oxford Dictionary where a word would contain at least one meaning. Hence, without the statutory interpretation, a lot of judges would have trouble in deciding their judgments in deciding a case. This essay will analyse the four rules, intrinsic aids and extrinsic aids and presumptions in the interpretation

that there is no ambiguity as to what the stance of a law is with regard to a particular

1. When interpreting legislation, the Courts use several approaches to aid their interpretation. Describe how the literal, golden and mischief rules of interpretation operate.

shall, to the extent of the inconsistency be void.” This means that any other law within the country

I agree with Dworkin on this because this idea of subjective decision-making and interpretation is evident in the American Legal Realism theory where rules (or law) are seen as insufficient to cover all different types of cases. Even though the theory of American Legal Realism believes in the above idea, it still believes that some laws do, in fact, cover certain cases and scenarios which allows for the direct application of the law and thus an objective approach to judicial decision-making and interpretation. Through this, we see that both Dworkin and American Legal Realism identify the balancing act between objective and subjective judicial decision-making and interpretation. Yet, both the theories of American Legal Realism and Dworkin strongly affirm the idea of a subjective aspect always, or often, coming into play when judges take part in deciding cases and interpretation.

of it. "The law and the opinion of the judge may not always be one and the

The Rules of the Statutory interpretation are The literal rule (IRC v Hinchy, 1960), the golden rule(R v Allen, 1872), The mischief rule (Smith v Hughes, 1960) and The Ejusdem generis rule (Powell v Kempton Racecourse, 1899) The golden rule of statutory interpretation may be applied where an application of the literal rule would lead to an absurdity(R v Allen (1872) LR 1 CCR 367). This is law/ legislation, which has been enacted by Parliament and through administrative process. The law enacted by Parliament is known as an Act of Parliament.

The enactment of both interim and final Constitutions ushered in a new approach to statutory interpretation. In this essay I argue that the statement made by the court in Daniels v Campbell 2003 (9) BCLR 969 ( C ) at 985 is TRUE.