Legislative Material — Internal Aids — Parts of a statute and their function in interpretation of a statute — Short and long titles, preamble, schedules, marginal headings, parts, and their captions, chapters and their

Your housing society notice says: “No hawkers, pedlars or vendors who have no licence may enter the compound.” The watchman stops a licensed hawker anyway. Is he wrong? It depends on nothing more than where a comma sits and what “who have no licence” attaches to. A statute is no different. Before a judge reaches for the world outside, she reads the Act itself: its titles, its preamble, its headings, its definitions, its provisos. This topic is the toolkit for doing exactly that, and the list of outside helps she may fall back on when the text still leaves doubt.

In two minutes

Read the statute as a whole first: its own parts (titles, preamble, headings, definitions, explanations, exceptions, illustrations, provisos, punctuation, non-obstante and saving clauses) are internal aids; only when doubt remains do courts turn to external aids such as dictionaries, translations, travaux préparatoires, statutes in pari materia, contemporanea expositio, debates and reports.

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