The Stated Purposes Canon
18 May 2018
12:15 - 14.00pm
Deakin Downtown, Level 12, Tower 2,
727 Collins Street, Melbourne Victoria 3008
Deakin Law School, in conjunction with the Statutes and Governance Project* invites you to a seminar on The Stated Purposes Canon with Professor Kevin Stack, the Lee S. and Charles A. Speir Chair in Law at the Vanderbilt University Law School in the United States.
Event details
The purpose of this seminar is to defend the stated purposes canon—and seeks to prompt a conversation on its role in both statutory interpretation and the role of enacted purposes in statutory design. The core argument is that this canon—that courts cannot construe statutes to negate their stated purposes—is and should be viewed as a bedrock principle of statutory interpretation.
The seminar will then highlight that the stated purpose canon should be a point of agreement between textualists and purposivists, a point of agreement that has deep roots in the Anglo-American tradition that extends back to early English statutory practice. Building on literature on the political economy of legislative process, the seminar will then defend the canon as providing a means for courts to prioritize the most public-regarding elements of legislation and thus to produce relatively more public-regarding interpretations. Finally, the seminar addresses the implications of the stated purposes canon for judicial review of administrative action.
Date: Friday, 18 May 2018
Time: Light lunch available from 12.15pm with the seminar commencing at 1pm
Venue: Deakin Downtown, Collins Square, Tower 2, Level 12, 727 Collins Street
RSVP: Friday, 11 May 2018 (Registration is free but we ask that you register for catering and venue capacity)
Registration is free but we ask that you register for catering and venue capacity
Key information
Date and time
Friday 18 May 2018
12:15 - 14.00pm
Location
Deakin Downtown, Level 12, Tower 2,
727 Collins Street, Melbourne Victoria 3008