I think we're more or less in agreement here, with the provisio that judges are unlikely to be asked to interpret legislation UNLESS it is ambiguous or incompetent.
I didn't mean to say that judges have no interpretative role - only that they cannot rule in contradiction to a clearly expressed law, unless that law is incompetent (in this context I intended that to mean where it runs against another piece of legislation - as with the Human Rights Act, or when the enactment process was flawed). I well remember cases where the judges made every attempt to discriminate their judgement from existing law which, to all intents and purposes, was bad law, but which was clearly expressed. There is a limit to teleological interpretation.
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branchandroot
Re: Part 2.
Date: 2006-05-31 12:24 pm (UTC)I didn't mean to say that judges have no interpretative role - only that they cannot rule in contradiction to a clearly expressed law, unless that law is incompetent (in this context I intended that to mean where it runs against another piece of legislation - as with the Human Rights Act, or when the enactment process was flawed). I well remember cases where the judges made every attempt to discriminate their judgement from existing law which, to all intents and purposes, was bad law, but which was clearly expressed. There is a limit to teleological interpretation.