Heydon's Case (1584)

Every question on the mischief rule is a question about this case. It is the source of the rule, and it is the only authority in the paper that supplies a method rather than a proposition — four questions to be asked in order, ending in a direction to the judge about what to do with the answers. A student who can set out the four questions in Lord Coke's own terms, and then show an Indian court working through them, has the spine of the whole mischief-rule answer.

It matters for a second reason. The purposive approach that Indian courts now use is this rule generalised. If you can state Heydon's Case accurately you can explain purposive construction as its descendant instead of treating the two as unrelated topics.

The facts of the sixteenth-century dispute are not what the paper examines, and this course does not set them out. What the course establishes, and what an answer needs, is the rule of construction that Lord Coke reported from the decision. Treat the case as an authority for a proposition rather than as a decision on facts, and do not invent a fact pattern for it.

Lord Coke's report states that "for the sure and true interpretation of all statutes in general (be they penal or beneficial, restrictive or enlarging of the common law) four things are to be discerned and considered:"

1. "What was the common law before the making of the Act."
2. "What was the mischief and defect for which the common law did not provide."
3. "What remedy the Parliament hath resolved and appointed to cure the disease of the Commonwealth."
4. "The true reason of the remedy; and then the office of all judges is always to make such construction as shall supress the mischief, and advance the remedy"

Note two things about the wording. The rule is expressly stated for all statutes, penal and beneficial alike, so an examiner's suggestion that it applies only to remedial Acts is wrong. And the report spells supress that way; reproduce it as it stands rather than silently correcting it.

The passage continues that judges are also to suppress "subtle inventions and evasions for continuance of the mischief", and to add force and life to the cure and remedy according to the true intent of the makers of the Act.

The rule rests on a simple premise: a statute is a response to a problem, so knowing the problem tells you what the words were meant to do. That premise is what makes the four questions a method and not a list.

Reusable as four steps:

1. What was the law before? Establish the position the Act was enacted against.
2. What was wrong with it? Identify the mischief or defect — the situation the earlier law failed to deal with.
3. What did the legislature do about it? Identify the remedy the Act appoints.
4. Why? Find the true reason of the remedy, and then choose the reading of the disputed words that suppresses the mischief and advances the remedy.

The fifth element is the anti-evasion direction. A construction that lets a party achieve the mischief by an indirect route defeats the remedy, and the judge's office extends to defeating such contrivances.

Two limits belong with the rule. First, the rule is not a licence to disregard clear words: it is used where the words are genuinely open, and a court that goes hunting for the legislature's motives before asking whether the words are ambiguous has gone wrong — the criticism the Supreme Court made of the High Court in Sodra Devi, which had "plunged headlong" into the reasons that motivated the legislature. Second, the rule is criticised as old: it was developed when the common law was the main source of law and judges often drafted Acts for the King and so knew what mischief they were meant to cure, and it hands an unelected judiciary the power to decide for itself what the mischief was. Dias's criticism is that the formula was built for a time of limited legislation and needs broadening now that statutes experiment with social norms on a larger scale.

It opens every mischief-rule question, and it is the natural opening of a purposive-construction question as well. State the four things "to be discerned and considered" in Lord Coke's terms, then work an Indian illustration through them — Commissioner of Income Tax v. Smt. Sodra Devi answers all four in sequence, and R.M.D. Chamarbaugwalla restates them in general terms and applies them to an Act that followed earlier Bombay legislation. For a narrow English illustration, Smith v. Hughes shows the mischief fixing what "in a street" was meant to catch.

It disposes of the argument that the mischief rule is confined to statutes altering the common law, and of the argument that a party who has arranged matters so as to fall outside the letter while producing the very evil the Act attacks is beyond the Act's reach.

It does not decide that purpose beats text. The four questions are put to words that are already open; the literal meaning retains its prima facie preference, and the court reaches Heydon only after finding ambiguity. Nor does the case tell you where to find the mischief — the admissibility of legislative history, objects and reasons, and committee reports is a separate question with its own rules.