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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 ...
A strict application of the plain meaning rule can sometimes result in "absurd" outcomes. Examples of the plain meaning rule producing absurd outcomes can be seen in the following cases: In Whitely v Chappel (1868), a statute made it an offence "to impersonate any person entitled to vote". The defendant used the vote of a dead man.
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.
These were: the mischief rule, the literal rule, and the golden rule. Statutes may be presumed to incorporate certain components, as Parliament is "presumed" to have intended their inclusion. [1] For example: Offences defined in criminal statutes are presumed to require mens rea (a guilty intention by the accused): Sweet v Parsley. [2]
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.
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 ...
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 ...
For example, in the 1904 case Fischer v. Union Trust Co. , the Michigan Supreme Court held that the one dollar paid for the sale of real property did not constitute valuable consideration since the transaction had not been bargained for—a dollar was handed to a mentally incompetent "buyer" who then dutifully handed it to the "seller".