[MUSIC] Statutory interpretation has semester long courses devoted to the subject. So, my goal here is simply to give you a brief introduction. That'll break into three take home lessons. Lesson number one. To begin, it's useful to identify the subject and the verb of the statutory sentence you want to understand. For example, take a look at Section 1-103 of the Uniform Commercial Code. Unless displaced by the particular provisions of the uniform commercial code. The principles of law and equity including the law of merchant and the law relative to capacity to contract, principal and agent, estoppel, fraud, misrepresentation, duress, coercion, mistake, bankruptcy, and other validating or invalidating cause supplement its provisions. It's a mouthful. Now, start by, pick a single word as the subject of this sentence, and another word as its verb. Hopefully, with a little work, you can see that principles is the subject of the sentence and that supplement is the verb. This gives you something to cling to and build upon. Does the sentence have an object? You bet, it's provisions. And what does its refer to? Well if you think about it, its got to be the uniform commercial code. And now you can go back and pick up other phrases and clauses. In this case, we learn that the principles of law and equity, including a bunch of other stuff that we'll come back to, supplement the UCCs provisions. Already we've made a lot of progress. We know that a bunch of other sources of law not written into the UCC, supplemented the provisions. But we can't forget the initial [COUGH] prepositional phrase. This supplementing doesn't occur if the principles of law and equity are displaced by particular provisions of the code. In terms of default rules, the common law of contract and a bunch of other things are still good law by default unless they are displaced by particular provisions of the UCC. Lesson number two. The great California Supreme Court Justice Roger Traynor in 1968 famously wrote that words do not have absolute and constant referents, unquote. Traynor was arguing for the necessity to consider extrinsic evidence in order to interpret the meaning of a contract. There have been ongoing heated debates about whether and under what circumstances extrinsic evidence should be introduced into evidence to resolve ambiguity. Some have argued that extrinsic evidence appropriately constrains judicial interpretation of statutes and contracts. Others have claimed that introducing extrinsic evidence sifted through the adversarial system gives the judge too much discretion to choose interpretations that diverge from what the parties, the drafters of the contract or the stature really intended. Words may not have absolute reference but they mean something. Otherwise you probably wouldn't waste your time listening to me. One way to accommodate the possibility of limited ambiguity is to think about a statute in terms of a simple Venn diagram with this single circle in which every point inside the circle represents a possible interpretation of the text. And an unambiguous text would be a single point. An ambiguous text, like depicted here, would give rise to several points. But a somewhat ambiguous text still isn't susceptible to all interpretations. The points outside the circle, represent interpretations to which the text is not reasonably susceptible. Imagine a statute says that it shall be a class A misdemeanor for any person to cause a vehicle to enter Traynor Park. The statute might be reasonably susceptible to an interpretation that prohibits bicycles or even skateboards as vehicles. But the quoted sentence is not reasonably susceptible to the interpretation that citizens are required to carry firearms in the park. The latter interpretation would be represented by a point outside of the circle. When the text is ambiguous, interpreters sometimes admit extrinsic evidence to resolve the ambiguity. For statutes, the extrinsic evidence might be legislative history. For contracts, the extrinsic evidence might be parol evidence Testimony of the parties as to what their conversation was when they were forming the contract. The additional evidence of what the drafters intended can help to narrow the Venn diagram. But again there are raging debates, both with regard to statute and contract interpretation about when and whether it's appropriate to admit extrinsic evidence. In contract law after considering all of the allowable extrinsic evidence. If there's still remains residual ambiguity, the courts next tern to rules of contraction such as choosing the interpretation that this favor is the drafter. This is the contra proferentem rule. Lesson number 3. Notwithstanding though, foregoing tidy story of using extrinsic evidence and then rules of construction to resolve ambiguity. Statutory and contractual interpretation has defied anything close to algorithmic treatment. Indeed, courts apply a host of interpretive canons. Most with impressive Latin names to help interpret statutes. In a famous 1950 article, Professor Karl Llewellyn showed that these canons were often oppositional. Different canons often lead to opposite interpretation, here I'm going to mention just three of the more famous interpretive canons along with an example of how the canon has been used. You might usefully show off in class by mentioning one of these Latin phrases in interpreting the case. By the way, I've found that the better the lawyer, the worse her pronunciation of Latin phrases so don't get hung up about particular Latin interpretation. The first interpretation I'm gonna speak about is the Noscitur a Sociis, which might roughly be translated. It's known from its associates. The Factories Act of 1961 required that quote, floors, steps, stairs, passage ways and gang ways, unquote had to be kept free from obstruction. A court in Pengelly versus Bell, Bell Punch, uses noscitur a sociis mode of interpretation. Held that since all the other words were used to indicate passages, a floor used exclusively for storage did not fall within the Act. The second canon of interpretation is the Ejusdem Generis canon, which means of the same kind, class, or nature. In Powell versus Kempton Park Racecourse, the House of Lords had to decide whether the Betting Act of 1853 which prohibited the keeping of a house, office, room or other place for the purposes of betting applied to the Tattersall's Ring which was an outdoor arena for the race course. The court said it did not as the specific places were all indoor places. However if the words other place had been followed by a word like wheresoever or whatsoever the rule would not apply. And then finally, you might want to learn the canon that goes by the phrase expressio unius. And the longer phrase is expressio unius est exclusio alterius. The inclusion of one thing implies the exclusion of the other. But people refer to this just as the expressio unius method. So an example is in 1831, a court applied the expressio unius principle to find that the poor tax levied on occupiers of quote, lands, houses and coal mines, unquote, under the Poor Relief Act of 1601. Could not be levied on owners of other types of minds, that the inclusion of coral minds implicitly excluded other kinds of minds. Remember, I'm only scratching the surface on a vast and difficult subject but this lecture can hopefully get you started. [MUSIC]
