![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liadnanThough the Court of Appeal have now held that despite the appallingly shoddy drafting of the legislation preventing unauthorised protests in Parliament Square, the section does indeed apply to Brian Haw, for the moment he remains (unless things have developed further since last night's raid).
The response from the Police and Government seems pretty ridiculously pathetic - see here for last night's antics.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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.
Re: Part 2.
Date: 2006-05-31 01:46 pm (UTC)Very little legislation can really be said to admit of only one meaning though. But as you say if it really does then it's unlikely anyone's going to be arguing about it: a judge is only going to make an explicit decision about what a statute means either if the point has been put in argument or (much less likely) it hasn't but they think it should have been.
Haws case is particularly interesting because the principle against retrospective legislation is a strong one, which the Divisional Court stuck to, but the CA went for a purposive approach, knowing as everyone did that the section in question was actually directly aimed at Haw.
Re: Part 2.
Date: 2006-05-31 01:49 pm (UTC)