COURTS AND STATUTORY INTERPRETATION

Courts and Statutory Interpretation



Courts and Statutory Interpretation

Introduction

Statutory interpretation refers to the set of rules that help the courts establish consistency in the interpretation of the meaning of laws and legislation for resolving statutes that reflect ambiguity and complexity. This may employ the adoption of different rules depending upon the nature of the complexity and ambiguity and the content reflecting them. However, there is a common perception that this provision provides court with the leverage to the courts and the judiciary to translate the laws in ways that may not reflect their true intention. According to many, rules and approaches that apply to statutory interpretation give too much latitude to the courts, and it seems there are no underpinning principles.

This paper aims at discussing the above mentioned problem in the context of the European courts and the various factors contributing to it. The paper presents a brief account of the concept of Law in the European perspective and goes on to describe the role of the courts in statutory interpretation as it developed.

Historical Background

The current meaning of the political concept of law is the result of a long and complex historical evolution. The underlying premise is that the law does not always follow the development of democratic values. On the contrary, the political datum of the central role of law is constant in the system of the sources of the right of the state, as the law is usually the most important source.

In different contexts, the law can find its foundation in institutional pluralism, in common law, or in its own representative character. However, from the bourgeois state on, the law assumes the essential meaning of the political and legal centre of the system of the sources of rights. As it is well known, the stabilization of the legal doctrine founded on the centrality of the political concept of law arose especially in France and Germany between the middle of the nineteenth century and the 1930s. However, the substantial meaning of this political act, an act enforcing the political choices of government, was still not the one presupposed by the contemporary theories of democracy.

Representation of Law

The role of the representative body (Parliament) and the monarch complicates the exercise of the sovereign function. While the former is responsible for defining the content of laws, the latter holds the actual power of adoption through the sanction of the act of command directed at the subjects, in the form of law. The political concept of state will be linked to the formal concept of law because "only the Sovereign or the supreme State power can issue laws. The circumstance in which only the sovereign or the supreme state power can adopt formal legislative acts does not theoretically follow from the concept of law, but from the notion of a state's effective establishment in a given political community. On the contrary, laws in a material sense can be qualified as all the sources authorized by the system to issue legal norms or ...