hello and welcome to statutary interpretation this is your second video for week one in the previous video we outlined the nature of this course and what this course would be would be covering for the purposes of your legal education we also outline how this course may be relevant moving forward in your legal education in this video we're going to consider why it's important to interpret statutes why is this skill on statutory interpretation so important that we devote an entire foundational course for you to be able to learn it this question hinges on a range of factors primary amongst these factors of course is the proliferation of statutes within common law countries common law countries traditionally did not have many statutes within them in fact the fundamental difference between common law and civil law systems was that the civil law systems were known to have a range of statutes or civil codes that regulated everyday life while the common law was known to have few statutes with a lot of judicial case law which through the principle of star decises became binding and started to fill in the gaps where statutes didn't exist so to put that in perspective civil law systems were more likely to have criminal cords that regulated an extensive range of human behavior while common law statutes were common law countries were more likely to have a few criminal statutes that regulated general principles of criminality which were then applied to a range of different situations by judges broadly speaking though as observed by Professor Lisa Burton Crawford of the new of the University of New South Wales we seen a proliferation of statutes within common law countries over the last three decades there's been an exponential growth of statutes within common law countries as they move towards becoming administrative States administrative states regulate more features of everyday life the administrative state has its ability to be able to move into the most basic functioning of everyday life and regulate it for instance we have laws now that regulate the amount of water that you can use we also have laws that regulate and how to cross roads we have laws that force you to put seat belts on we have other paternalistic laws that regulate how people sell products to who and to people of what age these statutes create a broader rubric of a statutary universe that is all-encompassing and means that the common law itself must become better at interpreting statutes and that's because the common law earlier did not deal with statutes to the same degree that it does that and so statutory interpretation as a legal skill becomes more important with the proliferation of statutes lawyers and judges are frequently now called upon to interpret laws and the range of laws that they interpret is fairly broad lawyers may be called upon to to interpret primary and secondary legislation but also we've seen a proliferation of commercial documentation and contracts that need to be interpreted learning statutory interpretation allows you to interpret these other legal documents as well as statutes and as we have more companies more contracts and More Of Our Lives is governed by by company conduct the interpretation of these documents is more important take the more recent examples of Facebook Facebook has created an oversight board that looks at Facebook bylaws to determine whether moderation is act accurate or inaccurate this determination made by the Facebook oversight board determines whether you have an ability to speak on Facebook products this includes Instagram Facebook and WhatsApp a primary mode of communication for many individuals broadly speaking your ability as a lawyer to interpret their bylaws is fundamentally your ability to be able to get a client a positive determination in front of the over sideboard so a lawyer lawyers role has expanded further than just interpreting statutes into company documents as well similarly with contracts contracts have for eons been the fundamental rubric with which commercial lawyers work however we see a proliferation of that understanding how to draft a contract free of ambiguity is an essential skill that you will need to develop this to is locked within this course to some extent because you learn to work with ambiguity interpreting statutes of course is not an is not a science it is an art form and causes significant disagreement that needs to be unpacked understanding statutory interpretation principles allows you to understand the nature of this disagreement between different judges lawyers and legal academics to illustrate some of these sort of differences let's have a look at United States in the United States there was a foundational disagreement about the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution in the 1960s the US Supreme Court was a fairly liberal body it was packed with liberal judges who decided that the right against self-incrimination ought to be interpreted broadly they interpreted it broadly to state that that right would be meaningless unless it included a right to privacy the US Supreme Court then in a case called brisel versus connected K basically expanded the right to privacy to include a right to bodily autonomy and that included a right to take contraceptives and then in the 1970s in a case called roow versus Wade they in they incrementally increased the protection to include a right to abortion within the more recent case in DOS the US Supreme Court now a more conservative body disagreed not with the outcome of abortion as a right being recognized but with the interpretive process that the US Supreme Court followed to be able to hold abortion to be they disagreed with the fact that abortion formed a meaningful penumbra right which emerged from the the right against self-incrimination contained within the first Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution accordingly they struck R down shows you just how much judges can disagree through a process of interpretation and interpretation alone in the 1960s and 70s a liberal US Supreme Court believed that purposive interpretation or interpreting the constitution in line with its purpose was the way forward they used contextual elements of the change in society since the promulgation of the Constitution to create create a right to abortion while the more conservative Supreme Court more recently used an originalist form of interpretation which meant that they gave affect to the meaning of words as they would have been intended at the foundational moment of the US Constitution to reach their different conclusion none of the judges agreed on the nature of the interpretive act so it wasn't an agreement or disagreement about the right to abortion it was an agreement or agreement about the nature of interpretation that gave rise to that act that is how foundational statutory interpretation is now the whole point of statutary interpretation is not just to to sort of understand the nature of disagreement it's a foundational aspect of legal study as a discipline as well it's not just a skill you have to solve cases but it's a foundational aspect ECT of understanding what law is and what law means that's something we'll touch upon in the next video but for now let's have a look at what statutory interpretation entails statutory interpretation entails much more than just interpreting ambiguity it entails an interpretation but also a construction interpretation is the act of looking at something and saying saying well there's ambiguity in this word let's interpret what this word means construction on the other hand is how to apply an interpretation to a given factual situation within statutory interpretation you have both an understanding of interpretation and an understanding of construction and this is critical for you to remember as you move forward through this course in fact it is one of the critical reasons why it's important to know statutory interpretation broadly speaking the fundamental unit with what you work with as a lawyer in statut interpretation cases is the idea of ambiguity statutes are prone to human error in drafting that's one reason why you have ambiguity simply that someone who dra Ed the statute made a mistake and that mistake caused a complete problem in identifying me so for instance if we were drafting a statute about assaulting people within Parliament and we said an individual cannot assault someone in the vicinity of parliament we've made a fundamental drafting error that drafting error is that we've used the word in the vicinity of in the vicinity means around a particular area and even though Our intention was to make sure that people were not assaulted within Parliament we have made a drafting error that means well people cannot be assaulted around Parliament while they can be assaulted within Parliament so fundamentally through our erroneous drafting of a statute we have effectively created ambiguity so if an individual assaults someone within Parliament their defense will be well the statute says in the vicinity and therefore I did it within Parliament so I'm not guilty of the crime under this particular criminal statute broadly speaking statutary interpretation principles allow us to get around this form of ambiguity ambiguity also arises for very very technical reasons either for semantic reasons or for syntactic reasons semantic ambiguity comes because of the ambiguous nature of Concepts Concepts have for hundreds of years been studied by philosophers because of their ambiguous nature wienstein for instance basically considered whether we could really ever follow a rule because well rules are based on Concepts and people have ambiguous understandings of Concepts work with this particular example because this is an example that comes through in basically every country that you can possibly study it deals with fishery statute countries have an interest in regulating fishing on in their their Maritime regions to be able to do a range of things one is to be able to protect the environment but the other is to also sort of regulate demand and supply and what is an essential good for trade which is seafood broadly speaking their fishery statutes are promulgated universally as anti- fishing statutes before many countries a question always arises within Court which is whether fishery statutes should by definition prevent whaling whales are also used by people with boats to be able to earn a living where people kill whales in order to get blubber for for a whole range of reasons we use whales for perfumes so on and so forth over wailing in the oceans has been subject to significant litigation between countries including between Australia and Japan in the WTO the question before a lot of quots has been whether fishery statutes include anti- wailing why and that's because the concept of a fish in science is different from the concept of a whale a fish is an analytically different animal than a whale whales are mammals fish are not mammals and so generally the consideration the argument leveled by people are wailing is of course this is an anti fishery statute it refers to fish through its statute that should not include whales and courts have reached different conclusions on this the point is those statutes reflect a form of ambiguity it's a form of semantic ambiguity the fact is that the word fish conceptually is ambiguous because of the nature of the English language things like cinns also exist which cause semantic ambiguity words don't convey accurate meaning and therefore we need to learn how to in interpret them a second example can be found in your readings or rather in your recommended readings for this week and that is by Lawrence n Solen Solen basically argues that there's an even more profound form of ambiguity that PL Sports in fact Solen in his book argues that judicial descent is almost always based on an idea of syntatic ambiguity syntatic ambiguity is ambiguity created by syntax or sentence structure in General slan Uses the following example he says imagine a statute that says whoever knowingly acquires food stamps in any manner not authorized by this chapter or the regulations has committed a felony Solen argues that the word knowingly is qualifying multiple Clauses knowingly there qualifies the act of acquiring food stamps knowingly also qualifies the clause which clarifies that the person has to acquire these food stamps in any manner not authorized by this chapter or the regulations therefore the question for the court will be would an individual be guilty of a crime if they did not know the law so assume a person knowingly acquired food stamps but was oblivious to the law is that person guilty of a crime the point is the intention of a statute like that is very clear person Parliament intended for them to be guilty of a crime if they acquired the food steps but because the word knowingly was put at the start of the statute the ad verb begins to qualify multiple different Clauses different judges will then read that qualification differently they will disagree on which clause is being qualified by the specific adverb again causing ambiguity within that statute this is the foundational way in which you identify ambiguity as a lawyer the first thing you must do is look at a statute to determine whether the statute is in fact ambiguous in any way shape or form when you look at a statute you should be able to determine whether there is a form of syntatic ambiguity or semantic ambiguity exploiting this makes for a better lawyer and understanding this makes for a better legal academic and a judge over the course of the next video we're going to go move on to assessing the aims of statutory interpretation I will see you in the next video