Studying Statute Law

Abstract

In its recent consultation paper,' the Training Committee of the Law Society has proposed that 'statute law' should form an identifiable part of the core of legal education. Whatever the merits of that particular proposal, it is a timely reminder of the centrality of reading statutes within legal skills in general, not only in code-based systems, but also in traditional common law systems. The question of how to study statutory interpretation becomes much more central to the process of legal education. Whereas there have been a number of manuals, such as Maxwell, Odgers, Bennion and Cross,2 which have collated and presented systematically the practice of statutory interpretation, few books in the common law have dwelt at length on the jurisprudential aspects of statutory interpretation-what interpretation involves and how the choice of interpretations is rationally justified. Even fewer texts in any language have engaged in serious comparison of the interpretational practices and theories of various jurisdictions. Meetings predominantly at Bielefeld of legal theorists from various jurisdictions have generated a book which is not only a unique collection of jurisprudential and comparative reflection, but also probes more deeply into the nature of statutory interpretation as a social phenomenon. This volume, edited by Neil MacCormick and Robert Summers,3 will long be an essential and valuable resource for anyone seriously studying statutory interpretation. It contains national reports on statutory interpretation in Argentina, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, each of which is written by leading legal theorists from the relevant jurisdiction. In a brief and clearly comprehensible account, the authors provide answers to a common set of questions covering different aspects of statutory interpretation, as well as the setting of legal institutions, practices and culture in each jurisdiction. Jim Evans, by contrast, has sought to confront issues of statutory interpretation with theories of linguistic philosophy. How is meaning brought about and what is the nature of understanding involved in this form of communication?