Preface

There is no shortage of very good studies of statute law and statutory interpretation. These studies fall into two broad types: those which explain the rules, procedures, principles and conventions relating to the enactment, drafting and interpretation of statutes, and those which offer broadly jurisprudential perspectives on, usually, one or the other side of the process: on how legislatures make laws, or on how courts and other decision-making bodies handle the laws that legislatures make. Elements of Legislation is a title perhaps best suited to the type of work belonging to the first of these two categories – a treatise on parliamentary procedure, say, or on professional drafting. But while certain treatises belonging to this first category were sometimes close to hand while this book was being written, the book cannot be counted among their number. Rather, it fits squarely within the second category of studies: it sets out a number of arguments concerning what legislatures create and what courts do with those creations.

The account of legislation that I set forth is by no means comprehensive, and I come up with no overarching thesis. My objective in writing the book, rather, has been to explore certain questions about legislation – about the distinction between statute law and case law, about the ideas of parliamentary authority and legislative intent, and about the core principles of statutory interpretation – which I think invite not quite new but certainly significantly revised versions of old answers. My primary interest is in, and my main intended audience is academics and students interested in, English law – albeit English law as part of the law of the United Kingdom. The statute law about which I write is not the product of a single legislature, and while the cases on which I draw for the purpose of developing arguments about legislation are mainly English cases, there are some instances where the arguments depend on case law illustrations from other legal systems. References to ‘statutes’ are normally to instances of primary legislation; in the sections of the book dealing with statutory interpretation, the word sometimes serves as shorthand for ‘statutes and/or statutory provisions’.