Oceans Apart?: The Rule of Lenity in Australia and the United States
| Author | Julian R Murphy |
| Position | PhD student, University of Melbourne, School of Law. Part of this Article was written during the course of a Human Rights Fellowship at Columbia Law School |
| Pages | 233-260 |
Occasionally traced back to Byzantine times, the rule that penal statutes are to be
expression in common law countries across the world. This Article compares the origins
and evolution of the rule in Australia and the United States. The comparison is timely
because of the current uncertainty in both jurisdictions about the rule’s rationale and
scope and because of an emerging global trend towards the “constitutionalization” of
common law rules of interpretation. In the course of the analysis, various facets of the
rule are discussed, including its common law origins; jurisprudential development;
of criminal statutes. Most importantly, despite similarities in the two countries’
each country.
Legislation, Statutory Interpretation, Strict Interpretation, Lenity, Penal Laws
© 2020 Julian R Murphy, published by Sciendo.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
A. Early Case Law from the High Court ..........................................
B. Modern and Contemporary Case Law: The “Last Resort” Rule
C. A Constitutional Dimension? .......................................................
.................................................................
9 Br. J. Am. Leg. Studies (2020)
E. Summary of the Current Australian Approach .............................
A. Early Case Law from the Supreme Court .....................................
B. Modern and Contemporary Case Law: The “Tiebreaker” Rule
C. Constitutional Foundations ..........................................................
(i) Separation of powers
(ii) Due process
(iii) Federalism
.................................................................
E. Summary of the Current American Approach ..............................
A. Early Case Law ............................................................................
B. Constitutional Foundations ..........................................................
..................................................................
D. Contemporary Iterations of the Rule ...........................................
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