Interpretation of Legislation

[Kiwi]

I had a discussion the other day with someone on IRC (I believe it was Flem) about legislation being interpreted in light of it's purpose.

Apparently according to TNP law legislation cannot be interpreted in light of it's purpose. This seems absurd to me because I would think it would be exceedingly helpful not to defeat the original intention of the drafter.

What does the RA think on this matter?

A perfect example of this would be the situation where Eluvatar convened the non-governmental group to deal with the potential coup by BW but potentially ends up facing charges himself.

This seems absurd.

I would think that a TNP equivalent of the Acts Interpretation Act is appropriate. A piece of legislation found in both New Zealand and Australia if I recall correctly.

This might also solve problems of inexperience with judicial officers.

 

[Romanoffia]

I absolutely agree.

Laws not interpreted in light of their original intent is an abuse of common law principles. It's like interpreting 'free speech' to include slander and libel as free speech.

This is one of the reason why I have always promoted a 'Common Law' system for TNP. But, unfortunately, most people tend to misunderstand exactly what the term 'Common Law' in terms of custom, tradition and legal interpretation means.

 

[Abbey]

It's ultimately often personal preference of the person making the ruling. I'm personally relatively literal if the evidence of the drafter's intent is scarce, but I certainly agree that even taking on some of the common law values may relieve some of the legal gridlock we always seem to be in.

 

[Flemingovia]

The principle in TNP has generally been to apply laws strictly according to their wording, even when a) this is way outside the original intent of the law, b) it is absurd and c) the orignal drafters of the law say "that is not what was intended when that law was passed.

The more we revise our laws or add to them, of course, the more anomolies crop up. Also we tend to get absurdities like people saying "the law does not absolutely specifically say this, so I do not have to do it" (c) Grosse, 2012.

The INTENT of setting up the office of AG was to push prosecutions through the court. Yet the way the office is currently being used is to prevent prosecutions.

My only issue is that our legislation is drafted by groups, so remembering and agreeing on the intent of legislation five or ten years down the line might be hard.

 

[Belschaft]

Being a common law jurisdiction doesn't magically make all those problems go away. You just end up with people bickering over what the intent of the law was, instead of what the precise wording means. And I'm pretty sure your conflating codified law and strict constructionism; there is no inherent reason why a common law system would favour alternative systems of judicial interpretation any more than a codified system.

 

[Gulliver]

There seems to be a general confusion between intent and precedent here. Deference to precedent is what defines a common law system, not interpreting laws based on the intentions of their drafters. It's entirely possible for a common law system to read laws literally while still deferring to precedent when there's an ambiguity which can be read several ways, which happens in natural language.

Anyway, if intent is going to be considered in interpreting laws then it should be limited to cases where there's a legitimate ambiguity. It wouldn't do, say, for someone to forget to put a "not" in their law and then have a law on the books which means the complete opposite of what it actually says, because that's what was intended, confusing everyone who isn't a scholar of TNP legislative history.

 

[Kiwi]

There seems to be a general confusion between intent and precedent here. Deference to precedent is what defines a common law system, not interpreting laws based on the intentions of their drafters. It's entirely possible for a common law system to read laws literally while still deferring to precedent when there's an ambiguity which can be read several ways, which happens in natural language.

Anyway, if intent is going to be considered in interpreting laws then it should be limited to cases where there's a legitimate ambiguity. It wouldn't do, say, for someone to forget to put a "not" in their law and then have a law on the books which means the complete opposite of what it actually says, because that's what was intended, confusing everyone who isn't a scholar of TNP legislative history.

Indeed. I was under the impression TNP already operated under a common law type system with a loose from of precedent where like cases were treated alike. But I could be wrong.

This is quite separate to that though, if a statute is ambiguous, the words should be taken in their literal meaning except where it would lead to absurdity. I also want legislation to be interpreted in light of it's purpose though.

E.g. lets say someone used the NPA Act to essentially restrict the NPA from going on the majority of missions proposed. This would frustrate one of the "aims" of the act as it is partly aimed at keeping a well trained army and a well trained army must go on missions regularly.

What do others think? Would you like me to draft something?

I'm sorry if any of this is unclear.

 

[mcmasterdonia]

I agree with this general idea. If I recall correctly Romanoffia brought something similar up for discussion quite a few months back. Obviously I'd like to see a proposal before I agree with it completely. But I approve of the general idea.

 

[Belschaft]

Ultimately this is a matter of who serves on the court. If the justices are strict construnctionalists, strict constructionalism you will get. That is the nature of judicial interpretation.

 

[Gulliver]

This is quite separate to that though, if a statute is ambiguous, the words should be taken in their literal meaning except where it would lead to absurdity. I also want legislation to be interpreted in light of it's purpose though.

That's not what I'm saying. My point is that if there's ambiguity in the language used then it's impossible to rely on a literal reading alone and in such cases using intent to disambiguate would be acceptable.

For example, suppose for some silly reason we had a law which say "No person may paint a house with shingles." Does that mean you're using the shingles to do the painting, or the shingles are part of the house? It's grammatically ambiguous, and in such a case using the intent of the law's drafters would be appropriate to pick which was meant.

On the other hand, if they forgot to include the part about shingles and banned all house-painting by accident, there would be no grammatical ambiguity and it would be inappropriate to insist that the Court insert the non-existent words "with shingles" and change the literal meaning of the law just because that was the original intent before the legislators messed up.

And yes, I am not very good at thinking of examples.

All that said, rather than passing a law, wouldn't it be simpler to elect justices which would adopt such a philosophy in their rulings?

 

[Kiwi]

I was talking to Flem about it and if I recall correctly the court previously said that legislation could not be interpreted in light of it's purpose.

Regardless of who the justices are, it seems even MORE absurd that the court would be able to completely change their minds on a whim simply because another justice has said so. Equally it would probably be unfair to whomever the previous decision involved.

But I guess because there is no superior court, this is what would need to happen anyway to bring about change.

As I said it was just an idea but if it's in statute and we allow justices to have this discretion, that would perhaps make the job easier instead of them having to get into the semantics over construction of phrases etc?