Presumptions in Statutory interpretation — Statutes are valid, Statutes are territorial in operation, Presumption as to jurisdiction, Presumption against what is inconvenient or absurd, Presumption against intending injustice, Presumption against impairing obligations or permitting advantage from one's own wrong

You lend a friend your phone charger and never write down the terms. Yet if he vanishes with it, nobody needs a rule book to tell you he was not meant to keep it. Much of life runs on assumptions like that: things people mean without saying. Courts read statutes the same way. Parliament cannot say “and of course we do not intend an unfair result” in every section, so the court starts with assumptions about what Parliament never meant. What are they, and when can they be displaced?

In two minutes

A presumption in statutory interpretation is the court’s starting assumption about what the legislature must have meant when it is silent; it is rebuttable, and it gives way to clear words to the contrary.

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