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However, use of the literal rule may defeat the intention of Parliament. For instance, in the case of Whiteley v. Chappel, [10] the court came to the reluctant conclusion that Whiteley could not be convicted of impersonating "any person entitled to vote" at an election, because the person he impersonated was dead. Using a literal construction ...
The purposive approach (sometimes referred to as purposivism, [1] purposive construction, [2] purposive interpretation, [3] or the modern principle in construction) [4] is an approach to statutory and constitutional interpretation under which common law courts interpret an enactment (a statute, part of a statute, or a clause of a constitution) within the context of the law's purpose.
In England and Wales, the Poor Law Amendment Act 1851, section 3, made it an offence to impersonate a "person entitled to vote" at an election.In the case of Whiteley v Chappell (1868), the literal rule of statutory interpretation was employed to find that a dead person was not a "person entitled to vote" and consequently a person accused of this offence was acquitted.
In the construction (interpretation) of statutes, the principal aim of the court must be to carry out the "intention of Parliament", and the English courts developed three main rules (plus some minor ones) to assist them in the task. These were: the mischief rule, the literal rule, and the golden rule.
The mischief rule [1] is one of three rules of statutory interpretation traditionally applied by English courts, [2] the other two being the "plain meaning rule" (also known as the "literal rule") and the "golden rule". It is used to determine the exact scope of the "mischief" that the statute in question has set out to remedy, and to guide the ...
The golden rule in English law is one of the rules of statutory construction traditionally applied by the English courts. The rule can be used to avoid the consequences of a literal interpretation of the wording of a statute when such an interpretation would lead to a manifest absurdity or to a result that is contrary to principles of public policy.
Rule 5, as advocated by James E. Krier, Earl Warren DeLano Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, and Stewart Schwab, Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, in Property Rules and Liability Rules: the Cathedral in another Light provides for a solution for the shortfalls of Rule 4. Under Rule 5, the court would use a best ...
Interpreting contracts in English law is an area of English contract law, which concerns how the courts decide what an agreement means. It is settled law that the process is based on the objective view of a reasonable person, given the context in which the contracting parties made their agreement. This approach marks a break with previous a ...