"LANGUAGE" OF THE LAW

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22005, 1 February 1937, Page 17

"LANGUAGE" OF THE LAW

PUZZLES FOR THE PUBLIC During many years many New Zealanders, trying to pick the meaning of statutes as a whole or sections of them, must have agreed with the remark of Dickens's Mr Bumble: "The law's a hass." Of course, people in other countries suffer similar bewilderment in the mazes of statutory phrases. For example, the "Accountant" (London} had occasion recently to comment on exasperating verbiage of statutes. "The accountant wrestling with the intricacies of the new Finance Act, as well as all its predecessors," the writer remarked, "has as good reason as anyone to bewail the linguistic defects of the Statute Book, and we note with interest that Mr A. G. Davis read a paper on the subject at a recent provincial meeting of the Law Society. That the draftsman has his difficulties, and very formidable ones, too, no ozie would deny, for there is no 'inevitable word' which will give a final and lasting meaning to .the interpretation of a legal phrase, and moreover the draftsman's first efforts are liable to be so drastically altered during the progress of the bill through its various stages, that it is sympathy rather than censure that he" needs. Mistakes in drafting or an ill-con-sidered word or phrase, the fuller implications of which have not been realised, may, however, cost both the state and the citizen dear, and Mr Davis stresses the importance of a fresh mind being brought to bear upon a bill after the draftsman has done ln's work. "Among -the remedies which he suggests are, first, that in an action necessitated solely by the imperfections of the drafting of a statute, the costs of both parties should be payable by the state, the public being safeguarded by the necessity of obtaining a certificate from the trial judge that the action was one which mainly concerned the interpretation of a doubtful point in the statute and was a proper one in other respects; second, that steps should be taken to ensure that no ill-considered amendments are ever embodied in a bill; third, that the staff of parliamentary counsel should be increased; and last, that standing committees should be appointed to report on every bill as soon as it is printed, and discover whether, as drawn, it represents the intentions of its framer. An c-minent secretary of the Privy Council in the reign of Queen Victoria described an act of parliament ns 'embodying the doubts and subtleties of generations of men,* and looking at the almost unceasing stream of legislation that flows from the Mother of Parliaments, the would-be law-abiding citizen must wish that the subtleties were less obscure and the doubts less frequent."