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This book is a distillation of a larger work Bennion on Statutory Interpretation. It consists of an introduction and eighteen chapters each summarized at the end. The common law system presented here is called the Global method both because it is worldwide and because it requires the interpreter to take every relevant consideration into account, including (under the doctrine of precedent) previous court decisions. The book starts by explaining what is meant by ‘common law legislation’. It then says that construing common law legislation has often been found difficult as an analytical concept, giving as the main reason deficiencies in legal education. One deficiency, still continuing, is to teach (mistakenly) that the interpretative criteria solely consist of the literal rule, the mischief rule, and the golden rule. The book aims to redress the deficiencies by presenting the issues briefly but correctly. There are a great many interpretative criteria, and where these conflict in a particular case there must be a judicial process of weighing and balancing. The criteria consist of four types: rules laid down by statute or common law, presumptions arising from the nature of legislation, principles of legal policy, and literary canons applying to all types of language. The book has a final chapter on techniques of ‘law handling’ or ‘law management’, which are central to any lawyer's or law student's functioning.

This book describes the encounter between the common law legal system and the tribal peoples of North America and Australasia. It is a history of the role of anglophone law in managing relations between the British settlers and indigenous peoples. That history runs from the plantation of Ireland and settlement of the New World to the end of the 20th century. The book begins by looking at the nature of British imperialism and the position of non-Christian peoples at large in the 17th and 18th centuries. It then focuses on North America and Australasia from their early national periods in the 19th century to the modern era. The historical basis of relations is described through the key, enduring, but constantly shifting questions of sovereignty, status and, more latterly, self-determination. Throughout the history of engagement with common law legalism, questions surrounding the settler-state's recognition — or otherwise — of the integrity of the tribe have recurred. These issues were addressed in many and varied imperial and colonial contexts, but all jurisdictions have shared remarkable historical parallels which have been accentuated by their common legal heritage. The same questioning continues today in the renewed and controversial claims of the tribal societies to a distinct constitutional position and associated rights of self-determination. The author examines the political resurgence of aboriginal peoples in the last quarter of the 20th century. A period of ‘rights-recognition’ was transformed into a second-generation jurisprudence of rights-management and rights-integration. From the 1990s onwards, aboriginal affairs have been driven by an increasingly rampant legalism.

This book analyzes the British Government's radical change in policy during the late 1950s on the use of bills of rights in colonial territories nearing independence. More broadly it explores the political dimensions of securing the protection of human rights at independence and the peaceful transfer of power through constitutional means. This book fills a major gap in the literature on British and Commonwealth law, history, and politics by documenting how bills of rights became commonplace in Britain' s former overseas territories. It provides a detailed empirical account of the origins of the bills of rights in Britain's former colonial territories in Africa, the West Indies, and South East Asia as well as in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It sheds light on the development of legal systems at the point of gaining independence and raises questions about the colonial influence on the British legal establishment's change in attitude towards bills of rights in the late 20th century. It presents an alternative perspective on the end of Empire by focusing upon one aspect of constitutional decolonization and the importance of the local legal culture in determining each dependency's constitutional settlement and provides a series of empirical case studies on the incorporation of human rights instruments into domestic constitutions when negotiated between a state and its dependencies. More generally, this book highlights Britain's human rights legacy to its former Empire, and traces the genesis of the bills of rights of over thirty nations from the Commonwealth.