Discipline of Law: Part Three

Most judges write judgments. A few write about how they decide. This reading puts you inside the working mind of one of the twentieth century's most influential English judges — not to learn a rule of law from him, but to watch a judge argue with the plain words of a statute when following them to the letter would have produced a result he thought unjust, and to ask where the line is between interpreting the law and rewriting it.

In two minutes

This reading is set to show students, through one judge's own account of his working method, the tension every court faces between the certainty of following a statute's words exactly and the justice of reading them in light of what the legislature was trying to achieve.

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