the subject purpose of a constitution or statute is the actual intent that the authors of it, namely, the framers of the constitution, or the legislature, respectively, had at the time of the making of the constitution or the statute. On the other hand, the objective purpose is not what the author actually intended but rather what a hypothetical reasonable author would have intended, given the context of the underlying legal system, history and values etc of the society for which he is making law.
Analysis of the concept of the purpose of a constitutional provision reveals that there are two kinds of purpose: subjective and objective. The subjective purpose is what the framers of the Constitution actually intended. The objective purpose, on the other hand, is what the provision should be seeking to achieve, given the general purposes of the Constitution and the core values of the legal system and of the Constitution. In other words, it is the purpose that a reasonable person would have had if he or she were faced with formulating the provision in question. In Asare v. Attorney-General [2003-2004] SCGLR 823, this Court held that, in determining the purpose of a provision, the interpreter should balance the two kinds of purpose. The spirit of a constitutional provision includes its objective purpose.
In construing a statute the primary duty of the court is to ascertain the general purport of that legislation from the words actually used in the statute. This is what is called the golden rule of statute interpretation formulated by Park B. in his oft-quoted dictum in Becke v. Smith (1836) 2 M. & W. 191 at p. 195: “It is a very useful rule, in the construction of a statute, to adhere to the ordinary meaning of the words used, and to the grammatical construction, unless that is at variance with the intention of the legislature, to be collected from the statute itself, or leads to any manifest absurdity or repugnance, in which case the language maybe varied or modified, so as to avoid such inconvenience, but no further.”
Whether a codifying statute restates the existing law
The Sale of Goods Act, 1962, is said to be an Act to codify with amendments the law relating to the sale and hire-purchase of goods. It was therefore not intended to be merely a code of the existing law. It is not open to question that it was intended to alter, and did in fact alter the law in certain respects. And as was said by Lord Herschell under similar circumstances in Bank of England v. Vagliano Brothers [1891] A. C 107 at p. 145, H.L., “And I do not think that it is to be presumed that any particular provision was intended to be a statement of the existing law, rather than a substituted enactment.”
It must be emphasized that the dictates of a statute unless amended, annulled, or repealed are inescapable. Therefore, where a statute forbids an act, a Court cannot grant immunity or waive the effects of a breach of a statute.
Judicial interpretation is about determining the legal meaning of a set of words. A set of words will often raise a range of possible semantic meanings and the task of judicial interpretation is to select which of these semantic meanings should be accepted as the legal meaning of the text. All legal texts which are placed before a court have to be subjected to this process of judicial interpretation, even if their meaning appears to be plain. This is because the plainness of the meaning is itself a conclusion reached by the relevant judge after a process of interpretation. That process need not be laboured or elaborate in every context. In some contexts, the legal meaning of words concerned can be determined simply and quickly. The words whose meaning become contentious tend to be those in exceptional cases where the legal meaning cannot be simply and quickly determined.
