Helpful or hollow? Rethinking the interpretive role of Interpretation Acts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In the era of increasingly complex legislation, the issue of statutory interpretation is gaining prominence, raising important questions about the role and effectiveness of normative acts that seek to regulate interpretive practices. This article analyses the content of Interpretation Acts currently in force in selected common law jurisdictions—including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, and the UK—with a focus on provisions that explicitly address interpretive issues. This article is divided into three parts. The first offers a general overview of interpretive provisions in Interpretation Acts, highlighting both their common regulatory areas and notable absences. The second examines substantive choices made within these Acts in response to key interpretive debates, with emphasis on the selected approach and use of extrinsic aids. The third section focuses on ambulatory provisions, a topic of growing significance in recent interpretive discourse. In this context, the article highlights Irish provisions, largely overlooked in discussions about interpretation in changing circumstances. The aim of the study is to assess the extent to which Interpretation Acts may influence interpretive practice. This article encourages further debate on the potential of these Acts to promote interpretive coherence and enhance the transparency of the interpretive process.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".