Statute Law Review, 2021, Vol. 42, No. 2, 266–290 doi:10.1093/slr/hmy035 Advance Access publication February 5, 2019 © Te Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. • 266 Spinning Yarns From Moonbeams: A Jurisprudence of Statutory Interpretation in Common Law Prabhakar Singh* ABSTRACT What methods, if at all, do Indian judges deploy in their law reading? In their abundant refer- ences to the term “jurisprudence”, the Indian judge gives neither precise meanings nor meth- ods to ascertaining what is jurisprudence; the judges declare when purposively breaking new grounds, or, the state constitutively roots for a strict, even a conservative, reading of its will and legislative intention. Judges while read penal and taxation statutes strictly, at the Indian Supreme Court the ‘ends of justice’ clearly override, as it should, positivist interpretations. Te legislature and the executive therefore tolerate the Supreme Court’s purposive reading down of the colonial statutes, just as, conversely, they reject the Court’s ‘reading down and reading wide’ of politically sensitive public law statutes to defend their postcolonial intent. I aim to map the uncertain landscape of the Indian Supreme Court’s use of “jurisprudence” and jurisprudence’s relationship with statutory interpretation. 1. INTRODUCTION Although there may have been some people among the Persians or the Chinese who were just as sensible as ourselves, it seemed to me that it would be most useful to be guided by those with whom I had to live and that, to discover what they said. René Descartes 1 Te common law in India cannot heed to, for beter or for worse, Descartes’ Discourse on Method for structural and historical reasons. Common law in India is a colonially planted and a post-colonially maintained orchard. Indian hands pluck legal fruits with Western ways. Te practitioner even frowns upon atempts at indigenous methods, if any, of law reading and application. Statutory laws and case laws make up the main body of the common law under the Indian constitutional scheme. Certainly, then, * Associate Professor and Executive Director, Centre for International Legal Studies, Jindal Global Law School, India. Comments from two reviewers have immensely improved the draf. Tank you to Upendra Baxi, Satya Prateek, Arun Sagar, Sarbani Sen, and Jewel Chanda for conversations. I read parts of my arguments in the faculty research workshop organized by Universitas Airlangga, Law Faculty, Indonesia and Royal University of Law and Economics, Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2018 for which my deep gratitude is due to Intan Soeparna and Channraksmeychhoukroth Dany. Email: prabhakarsingh.adv@gmail.com 1 R Descartes Discourse on Method and Related Writings, D. Clarke (tr) (Penguin New Delhi 1999 [1637]) [19]. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/slr/article/42/2/266/5306920 by BG Kliniken Bergmannsheil user on 09 February 2023