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Vanderbilt Law Review

A Symposium on Statutory Construction--Foreword

First Page

365

Abstract

Since even Professor Wade, the Faculty Editor of the Vanderbilt Law Review, has yielded to the theory of blurbs, who am I to gainsay him and deny myself the pleasure of expressing a word of warm appreciation for an admirable symposium on statutory construction? The symposium is illuminating not because it has spawned new ideas which will relieve lawyers from the hard, high tasks of advocacy or judges from the anguish of judgment. The abstract ideas in the papers, apart from their concrete applications, are not, I venture to believe, very different from what is found in a charming essay on statutory interpretation written nearly four hundred years ago, for which we are indebted to Professor Samuel E. Thorne of Yale.' Nor, indeed, has much been added by way of generalities to the wisdom of the resolutions in Heydoi,'s Case, as reported in the robust English of Coke's Reports. The interpretation of statutes is merely one aspect of the interpretation of writings generally. Since man has been busy writing for a good long while, the problems of rendering what has been written are as old as com- position itself. To be sure, thought has not stood still. It has been nourished by advances in scholarship in many directions, particularly pertaining to language and the relation of words to thought and feeling

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