Golden Rule: Observations of Irish Law reform Commission

The golden rule is still referred to by the courts today as a means of modifying stringent application of the literal rule.

It was set out by Lord Blackburn inRiver Wear Commissioners v Adamson.

The golden rule, he stated, enabled the courts:

"to take the whole statute together, and construe it all together, giving their words their ordinary significance, unless when so applied they produce an inconsistency, or an absurdity or inconvenience so great as to convince the court that the intention could not have been to use them in their ordinary significance, and to justify the court in putting on them some other signification, which, though less proper, is one which the court thinks the words will bear."

This is mirrored by the more lenient application of the literal approach to interpretation now favoured by the Irish courts, whereby a literal construction is replaced by a more purposive one in cases of doubt or ambiguity.

Statutory Drafting and Interpretation, Consultation Paper on: Plain Language and the Law (LRC CP14-1999) [1999] IELRC 1 (1st July, 1999)

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