Model Rules of Interpretation for legal documents

While the interpretation of legislation is often governed by an Interpretation Act, such as the Acts Interpretation Act 1901 (Cth), there is no corresponding simple set of principles at common law. Accordingly, many contracts and other legal documents contain lengthy sets of boilerplate provisions, setting out or clarifying particular rules of interpretation.

These Model Rules of Interpretation set out general principles about the interpretation of legal documents, drawing on relevant sections of the Acts Interpretation Act 1901 (Cth) and Interpretation of Legislation Act 1984 (Vic). They can be incorporated into an existing document by reference, adopted by an organisation (in whole or in part), or adapted for other purposes.

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.

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