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Distance Course on Legislative Drafting for Democratic Social Change |
Week 15Lesson objectives for this week In prior weeks we have considered various tools that guide interpretation of a statute. These include a country’s constitution and Interpretation Act as well as judicial rules of interpretation. This session is concerned with another aid to interpretation - interpretation devices that appear in the statute itself. Depending on the statute and the country’s local practice these devices include the preamble, long title, general purposes clause, definitional clauses, and annotations to the bill. Although interpretation aids do not substitute for careful sentence by sentence drafting to reduce the possibility for penumbral cases they are extremely helpful in guiding official discretion when vagueness or ambiguities arise. Assignments
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