Education Monograph 4 – Statutory interpretation: principles and pragmatism for a new age

Cover for Education Monograph 4 - Statutory Interpretation

Paperback, 248 pp, June 2007, ISBN 9 7807 31356 195
To obtain a copy, please see Obtaining publications.

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.”