What really happened in Dr Bonham's case? Statutory interpretation and voidance then, and now

In Dr Bonham’s Case (1610), Sir Edward Coke famously declared that the common law “controls” statutes, and may hold them to be “utterly void” if they are “against common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed”. But what, exactly, he meant has been the subject of considerable debate. Common law constitutionalists cite his dictum as evidence that courts in the 16th and 17th centuries, when interpreting statutes, employed common law principles much more robustly than modern courts do, and occasionally held statutes that flouted them to lack legal validity. This article disputes their account. It summarises the most recent findings of legal historians, elaborates on them, and offers some fresh insights into Dr Bonham’s case and, more briefly, the Earl of Leicester’s case (1571). It situates Coke’s dictum within his broader reasoning in the case, understood in its legal and historical context. It also compares the judicial interpretation of statutes in those earlier centuries with their treatment now, and shows that the interpretive norms and methods in both periods are much more similar than is commonly realised, although this is obscured by changes in the meaning of the word “void”. The norms and methods of Coke’s day relied heavily on assumptions and assessments concerning Parliament’s likely intentions and purposes. A statutory provision might be deemed partly or wholly “void” if it was incoherent or otherwise impossible to apply, or its application in particular circumstances would have very undesirable consequences that Parliament apparently did not anticipate and would probably have found intolerable. Examples of both problems continue to arise in modern cases, although we no longer use the word “void” to describe their resolution.