Snapshot
- Recent High Court decisions have clarified the unusual relationship between the key principle of context and provisions in the Acts Interpretation Act 1901 relating to extrinsic materials, but another issue about the relevance of extrinsic materials has arisen.
- Two separate presumptions about statutes binding the Crown have been distinguished and their scope addressed by the High Court.
- The High Court has recharacterised an older principle about the use of defined terms in statutory interpretation that has been the subject of criticism and confusion.
Statute law is the predominant source of law. So, statutory interpretation law is relevant to nearly every practising lawyer. Happily, the broad framework and broad key principles that underpin how we are to interpret a statute are well established. But the familiarity of this framework can obscure not only the challenges of the interpretative task in hard cases, but the development of the multitude of individual principles and presumptions that inform that task. This article provides a refresher on that well-established framework and then explores some recent legal developments for individual principles.
