A legal fiction? Pt 1

For many aspiring lawyers, almost the first thing learned in law school in relation to statutory law is that there are certain, hallowed canons of statutory interpretation, designed to cater for the fact that different people might well interpret the language of a particular Act of Parliament in different ways.

Put another way, these rules of statutory interpretation exist to deal with the problem that any given series of words, however carefully penned by the statutory draftsman, might well be open to two (or more) very different—but not necessarily unreasonable—interpretations. It is perhaps odd then that, when faced with the question of whether the defendant has committed the tort of defamation, the courts dismiss the possibility that a statement may be genuinely ambiguous, and prefer instead to adhere to “the fiction that there is a single reasonable reader, so that the words, duly taken in context, have only one meaning” (Ajinomoto Sweeteners Europe SAS v Asda Stores Ltd