Subjects:

Practice & Procedure

Contents:

1. Basic concepts I: common law statutes

the enactment

legal meaning

factual outline and legal thrust

implied ancillary rules

2. Basic concepts II: opposing constructions

literal, purposive and developmental interpretations

3. Grammatical and strained meanings

4. Consequential and rectifying constructions

5. Contradictory enactments and updating construction

6. Drafting techniques and the Interpretation Act

7. Transitional provisions and the Cohen question

8. Words in pairs

9. Rules of interpretation

10. Legal policy

11. Interpretative presumptions

12. Linguistic canons and interpretative technique

13. The nature of judgment

14. The nature of discretion

15. The European Union and the HRA

16. The jurisprudential basis of the common law method

17. The common law system in America

18. Techniques of law management

There are many countries that use and apply the common law, which collectively may be called the common law world. A feature of this world is that nowadays it largely operates through statutes enacted by a country's democratic legislature, and that these mainly fall to be construed according to a uniform system of rules, presumptions, principles and canons evolved over centuries by common law judges. The statutes subject to this interpretative regime may be called common law statutes. They are the main subject of this book, along with the said uniform system. The book distills and updates within a brief compass the author's published writings on statute law and statutory interpretation which span a period of nearly forty years, being contained in half a dozen books and many more articles. The chief books are Statute Law (Longman, third edition 1990), Halsbury's Laws of England, Title Statutes (Butterworths, 4th edition reissue 1995), and Statutory Interpretation (Butterworths, third edition 1997, supplement 1999). Since its first publication in 1984, the last named work has also been updated each year in the All England Law Reports Annual Review (Butterworths).