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Legislation and statutory interpretation.

Module A: Introduction to legislation.

Chapter 3: Nature and types of legislation.

Nature
Legislation is communication to lawmakers, to the persons concerned or affected, and to the judiciary. It can be used to criminalize what is thought to be mischief ("bad" or "wrong"). Consider legislation as functional and instrumental (enacting words). And after Edward Rubin: transitive vs intransitive statutes; internal vs external.

"My hunch is that the answer has to do with the sort of institution a legislature is: a large gathering of disparate individuals who purport to act collectively in the name of the whole community, but who can never be sure exactly what it is that they have settled on, as a collective body, except by reference to a given form of words in front of them": Jeremy Waldron, The dignity of legislation (1995). The United States Constitution is "less a series of propositional utterances than a commitment to taking political conversation seriously.... [T]he Constitution is best understood as supportive of such conversations and requiring a government committed to their maintenance": Sanford Levinson after J&uuml;rgen Habermas, quoted in Waldron above.

Lon Fuller's Rex made the first mistake of not having legislation. Where there are no laws, there is no place for industry because no one will know if they will be entitled to the fruits of that industry: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). Rules improsed by the legislature is one of the building blocks of commonwealth/society: John Locke, Two treatises of government (1689).

Contrast legislation as directives ("delegation" contra "void for vagueness") with laws as rules in the administrative state: Edward Rubin. Goal-legislation sets out aspirational norms, then result-prescribing norms, then accountability norms (cf. Rubin's "intransitive"). Implementation norms ("transitive") are left for e.g. private bodies. The means and responsibility for achieving the goal are left for the addressees. An intermediate is implementation-oriented legislation. Is there space for freedom beyond such legislation?

Types
Primary legislation can delegate the making of secondary legislation, which must be intra vires. Henry VIII clauses enables secondary to amend (some) primary.

Other classifications of legislation: public/general vs local/personal/private (vs hybrid); government-sponsored vs backbench bills (vs prerogative); amending (textual vs non-textual; Keeling schedule) vs non-amending.

Entrenched legislation is in tension with the orthodoxy of parliamentary sovereignty, attenuated by the doctrine of constituting/constitutional statutes. See: "The seat of sovereign power is not to be discovered by looking at Acts of any Parliament but by looking at the courts and discovering to whom they give their obedience": H. W. R. Wade, The basis of legal sovereignty (1955).
 * MacCormick v Lord Advocate
 * Thoburn v Sunderland City Council; ''BH v Lord Advocate
 * Minister of the Interior v Harris 1952 (4) SA 769 during the Coloured vote constitutional crisis;
 * Jackson v A-G [2005 UKHL 56].