This beats me

Stephen Sedley

  • Statutory Interpretation by Francis Bennion
    Butterworth, 1092 pp, £187.00, December 1997, ISBN 0 406 02126 0
  • Law and Interpretation edited by Andrei Marmor
    Oxford, 463 pp, £18.99, October 1997, ISBN 0 19 826487 9
  • Equality before the Law: Deaf People’s Access to Justice by Mary Brennan and Richard Brown
    Deaf Studies Research Unit, University of Durham, 189 pp, £17.50, October 1997, ISBN 0 9531779 6 3

‘So, then,’ says a founding father, quill poised, to the founding fathers around him in Gary Larson’s cartoon, ‘Would that be “Us the people” or “We the people”?’ If deciding what to write is tough, interpreting what gets written is tougher. Turgid texts need unravelling; obscure provisions need deciphering; occasional nonsense needs correcting; perfectly clear texts may be impossible to apply to novel situations. These and other quotidian exercises are the subject of judgments and commentaries which try to bring ordered methods to bear on the translation of a text into an outcome – that is to say, on trying to give a law its proper effect.

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Vol. 20 No. 7 · 2 April 1998 » Stephen Sedley » This beats me (print version)
Pages 3-6 | 4298 words