Monash University
Browse

Coherence in the Age of Statutes

Download (384.59 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2019-10-29, 09:33 authored by Ross Grantham;Darryn Jensen
The High Court of Australia, in pursuing coherence between common law and statute law, has limited itself to ensuring that the rules of common law and statute law should be free of contradiction. The Court does not appear to have embraced the idea, which lies at the core of some major theories of private law, that a set of rules is coherent only if the set can be explained as the outworking of a single principle. Applying that idea to the relationship between common law and statute law is confronted by some serious challenges. In the past, coherence as non-contradiction (combined with the idea of parliamentary supremacy) has worked well as a means of reconciling common law with statute law, but the proliferation of legislation in recent years and the character of much modern legislation has drawn attention to the limitations of such an approach to the question. A more exacting approach to coherence of common law and statute law, on the other hand, would require the revision of some widely-held assumptions about the nature of law, such as the core assumption of legal positivism that the ultimate criterion of the authority of the law is its pronouncement by an authoritative institution.

History

Publication Date

2016

Volume

42

Issue

2

Type

Article

Pages

360–382

AGLC Citation

Ross Grantham and Darryn Jensen, ‘Coherence in the Age of Statutes’ (2016) 42(2) Monash University Law Review 359

Usage metrics

    Monash University Law Review

    Keywords

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC