Paperback, 248 pp, June 2007, ISBN 9 7807 31356 195 $50.00 (includes GST)

To obtain a copy, please order from shop.nsw

Description

Statutory interpretation has increasingly become one of the core functions performed by judges and lawyers. As Chief Justice Spigelman has put it, our time is "an age of statutes", where "no area of the law has escaped statutory modification": "The Poet's Rich Resource — Issues in Statutory Interpretation" (2001) 21 Australian Bar Review 224 at 224.

This collection of essays analyses the principles and practice of statutory interpretation from a variety of perspectives — judicial, academic, legislative drafter, Australian, Canadian, American — to provide a detailed exploration of the topic. As Justice Michael Kirby says in his review of the monograph:

"Anyone wanting to secure a good overview of the current approaches and principles being adopted in statutory interpretation would do well to take in this book...[F]or judges and lawyers, statutory interpretation is now the name of the game. A book like this, which draws together many threads, provides an excellent overview of the main themes and honestly confronts the big debates that this form of legal activity inevitably involves."

Contents

• Foreword, The Honourable JJ Spigelman AC, Chief Justice of NSW
• Editor's Note
• Statutes, The Honourable WMC Gummow AC, Justice of the High Court of Australia
• The Principles of Legality and Clear Statement, The Honourable JJ Spigelman AC, Chief Justice of NSW
• The Intent of Legislators, The Honourable Justice Keith Mason AC, President, NSW Court of Appeal
• The High Court of Australia and Modes of Constitutional Interpretation, The Honourable Justice Susan Kenny, Judge of the Federal Court of Australia
• Legislative Drafting and Statutory Interpretation, Ms Hilary Penfold QC, First Parliamentary Counsel, Commonwealth Office of Parliamentary Counsel, 1993–2004
• Statutory Interpretation in Canada, Professor Ruth Sullivan, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa
• Purpose and Context in Statutory Interpretation, Associate Professor RS Geddes, School of Law, University of New England
• Structuring Purposive Statutory Interpretation, Professor Philip P Frickey, School of Law, University of California at Berkeley
• Saving the Literal: Fundamentalism versus Soft Logic in Statutory Interpretation, Professor James C Raymond, Consultant in Legal Writing and Reasoning
• Index, Table of Statutes, Table of Cases