The Judicial Role: Statutory Interpretation and the Pragmatic Judicial Partner

Abstract

One of the most significant reasons for regretting the demise of the Punch magazine is that it deprived us of an accurate barometer of social development over the decades. In one of my favourite Punch cartoons of the early 1900s, two progressive looking parents are standing looking at a wall on which their offspring has produced a drawing of questionable quality: the mother is pointing it out to an apparently receptive father as illustrative of how their offspring is able to express his creative instinct, while the offspring is remarking to his junior sibling with an air of pleased surprise ‘Oh, so that’s what I was doing…’. A pleasing contrast to the cartoon two or three decades later, by which time modernist parents have clearly put up with quite enough nonsense and are inclined towards a return to tradition: a similar wall has been beautified by a similar picture and...