Legislative Intent and Ordinary Meaning

We hope everyone had a lovely holiday season! In this second newsletter update, we are proud to share what the Legislative Intent and Ordinary Meaning project on law and language at Western Law has been up to lately.

Upcoming talks

We are excited to welcome Robert Mullins (Queensland) to Western Law on Tuesday, February 10 at 12:30 pm (EST). Mullins will present his talk, which you can join via Zoom, “Are Sex and Gender Terms Open Textured?” The talk will explore sex and gender terms as “open textured” predicates in the tradition of HLA Hart and Friedrich Waismann. Mullins’ argument is for an analysis of sex and gender terms in terms of defeasible, rather than strict and exceptionless rules. The argument has important implications for both legal and philosophical understandings of sex and gender.

Past talks

In November, we hosted Luciana Moro (Deakin). Moro’s talk was titled “Principles of Statutory Interpretation and Parliament’s Intentions: Re-Examining an Overlooked Relationship”. Luciana’s talk was a thoughtful exploration of the role that principles of statutory interpretation play in legislative drafting. She argued that principles of statutory interpretation are what allow a group of legislators to form a collective intention and speak with a single voice. Her paper has implications both for the proper use of principles of statutory interpretation and for when new principles should be recognized.

In October, we hosted Ross Pey (Western), who is a PhD candidate at the law school. Ross discussed two issues: (1) the general approach to interpreting bilingual or multilingual legal texts, and (2) the typical problems associated with resolving discrepancies in two or more texts of different languages. The talk raised interesting issues of multiculturalism, postcolonialism, the “narrow reader problem”, and statutory interpretation, and it considered these issues in the context of the Acts of the Senedd in Wales. Ross’s talk raised thoughtful questions from the in-person and online audience alike, including Western community members, Canadian and international academics, and judges.

Blog posts

We have also shared another blog post about the study of law and language. This time, we interviewed Ross Pey, who is a PhD candidate at Western Law and gave a talk in October. Ross sat down with our project’s research assistants to discuss recent trends in statutory interpretation and his research on bilingual statutory interpretation in Wales, tax avoidance/evasion, comparative statutory interpretation, and Brexit. The discussion is a helpful survey of recent and future trends in statutory interpretation across the common law.

Stay tuned for more updates!