External Aids to the Interpretation of a Statute

In one line

An external aid is something outside the statute itself that a court may look at to work out what the statute means.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: external aids to construction are materials outside the four corners of the enactment which a court may consult where the language is ambiguous, including dictionaries, translations of an Act published in another language, travaux preparatoires or the preparatory work behind an instrument, statutes in pari materia meaning other Acts on the same subject, contemporanea expositio meaning the contemporaneous understanding of those who had to administer the Act, parliamentary debates and the statement of objects and reasons, and the reports of committees and commissions which led to the legislation; they are resorted to after the internal aids and never in place of clear words.

When a court may go outside the Act

The rule is one sentence and it should open the answer. External aids may be used where the language of the provision is ambiguous or where its literal reading produces a doubtful result; they cannot be used to contradict words that are plain.

That follows from what an aid is. The court is looking for the meaning of what the legislature enacted, and material outside the Act was not enacted. It is evidence of intention, and it is weaker evidence than the words themselves.

MU lists seven. Each is taken in turn, in MU's own order.

Dictionaries

The use

Where a word is not defined in the Act and its ordinary meaning is in doubt, a court may look at a dictionary.

The three limits

One, the dictionary gives all the meanings; the context chooses one. A dictionary tells you what a word can mean, and no dictionary can tell you what it means in section 14 of a particular Act.

Two, the dictionary of the right period. A word in an Act of 1872 is read as it was understood in 1872, unless the Act is one that moves with the times.

Three, and this is the one that is examined: in a commercial or fiscal statute, the trade meaning beats the dictionary meaning.

Commissioner of Sales Tax, Madhya Pradesh v. Jaswant Singh Charan Singh, AIR 1967 SC 1454, is the authority.

Facts. A dealer in firewood and charcoal claimed that charcoal was "coal" within entry I of Part III of Schedule II to the Madhya Pradesh General Sales Tax Act 1958, and so taxable at two per cent rather than at four per cent under the residuary entry. The Revenue argued that coal is a mineral while charcoal is manufactured by human agency from wood, so that the dictionary meaning should not be relied on.