ABSTRACT
A statute has been defined as ‘the will of the legislature’.36 The function of a court of competent jurisdiction in relation to an Act of Parliament is, according to Coke, to interpret that Act ‘according to the intent of them that made it.’37 This statement of Coke has, to a great extent, down the ages, influenced the judges in the interpretation of an Act of Parliament. The judges have always maintained that it is their function to give expression to the intention of Parliament.38 And in Warburton v. Loveland,39 it was stated that,
Where the language of an Act is clear and explicit, we must give effect to it. Whatever may be the consequences, for in that case the words of the statute speak the intention of the legislature. In SE Railway v. Railway Commissioners,40 Cockburn, CJ thought that
where the meaning of an Act was doubtful the judges were at liberty to refer to the circumstances under which the Act was passed into law as a means of solving the difficulty. Lord Reid41 has stated that there was room for exception where examining the proceedings in Parliament would almost certainly settle the matter immediately one way or the other.42 There is the eighteenth century view43 that the sense and meaning of an Act of Parliament must be collected from what it says when passed into law, ‘and not from the history of changes it underwent in the House where it took its rise’.
