Principles of Constitutional Interpretation of Statutes

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Constitutional adjudication affects several aspects of culture of institutions and life of the people of a nation governed by it. Therefore, there can be no fixed or rigid rules of interpretation of the Constitution. American legal experts on the working of the Constitution of USA which is the oldest of an oldest democracy, have identified certain trends of interpretation in the long working of the Constitution and have identified certain principles — study of which may be beneficial for interpreting our Constitution, which is merely little more than fifty years old. Textual interpretation — plain meaning rule Under the textual interpretation, the most important is the language of the Constitution. Justice Marshall wrote in Sturges v. Crowninshield1: (L Ed p. 550) “[A]lthough the spirit of an instrument, especially of a Constitution, is to be respected not less than its letter, yet the spirit is to be collected chiefly from its words. ... if, in any case, the plain meaning of a provision, not contradicted by any other provision in the same instrument, is to be disregarded, because we believe the framers of that instrument could not intend what they say, it must be one in which the absurdity and injustice of applying the provision to the case would be so monstrous that all mankind would, without hesitation, unite in rejecting the application.” Justice Marshall did not equate “plain” meaning with “literal” meaning but rather the meaning that it would have for a “normal speaker of English” under the circumstances in which it was used. Even on the principle of textual interpretation, American courts from case to case expressed a consistent view that such is the character of human language that no word conveys to the mind, in all situations, one single definite idea; and nothing is more common than to use words in a figurative sense. The words thus are used in the

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