参考答案：

Statutory interpretation In order to apply any piece of legislation, judges have to determine its meaning. In other words, they are required to interpret the statute before them in order to give it meaning. The difficulty, however, is that the words in statutes do not speak for themselves and interpretation is an active process, and at least potentially a subjective one depending on the situation of the person who is doing the interpreting. Judges have considerable power in deciding the actual meaning of statutes, especially when they are able to deploy a number of competing, not to say contradictory, mechanisms for deciding the meaning of the statute before them. There are, essentially, two contrasting views as to how judges should go about determining the meaning of a statute – the restrictive, literal approach and the more permissive, purposive approach.