Business Law Short Essay

Business Law Short Essay

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Qn. 1:

One of the descriptions provided for the term statutory interpretation is the attempt by the court to have a clearer understanding or examination of a given piece of legislation. In the majority of instances, judges find themselves listening to appeal because there was a debate over how the judgement of the case was reached. In this regard, judges sitting in Australia’s courts put in place three core rules when making an interpretation of set out statutes.^[1]

In the instance when the literal rule or the ordinary meaning rule is adopted, the court sets out that the words that are contained within a specific statute should be provided with a literal meaning in spite of whether or not in the end, the judgement that is passed is sensible. In the large majority of cases, judges find themselves applying this rule when they feel that their only role as contained within the constitution is applying the laws that have been created by parliament.  Therefore, they do not want to be seen as being a part of coming up with a law considering that this should only be a role that is played by the legislature.^[2] 

On the other hand, the golden rule is often used in the instance that the literal rule leads to a situation where the intention of Parliament can be overcome as opposed to being applied. In passing judgement on the case of Grey v Pealson (1857), Lord Wensleygale set out that the literal rule should always be the first to be used but if it ends with any type of confusion, the grammatical aspect of the words might be changed in an effort to remove the confusion but not for any other reason.^[3] The mischief rule on the other hand refers to the instance when a judge is involved in making a determination of the intention driving the legislators when they came up with a certain law. Essentially, the rule encourages the judge to further examine the defect that the particular law wishes to solve and provide a solution that is effective in this case.^[4] 

A key difference that occurs between the literal and purposive rules is that while the literal rule needs the judge to examine the piece of law with  the ordinary meaning  of the words that are contained, in adopting the purposive approach gives a great deal of flexibility. Additionally,  when using the purposive approach the judge does not only make a consideration of the instance when the gap might be found in the given  law before but are also attempting to examine what Parliament aimed at achieving when passing the requisite law. ^[5]