COST MANAGEMENT IN POLICE DEPARTMENT

Cost Management in Police Department



Cost Management in Police Department



Introduction

I want to pose some questions to open this lecture with a little provocation. Do United States judges, unlike their Australian counterparts, when ascertaining the meaning of their Constitution, engage in a quaint ritual of ancestor worship? Are our American colleagues so mesmerised by the awe in which they hold the revolutionary founders of the republic who wrote their Constitution (Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton etc) that they feel obliged to construe the text, 220 years on, by ascertaining the intentions of those great men at the time they wrote it, however inapt those intentions might be to contemporary circumstances? (Brest, 1980)

A Case Analysis of the Originalism in Constitutional Interpretation: Cole V Whitfield

In brief, when a problem arises under their Constitution, is the judicial duty to consult the historical records to find the original intentions of the founders? Is the task "rather like having a remote ancestor who came over on the Mayflower"2 , (akin in our case, perhaps to the Sirius ), and asking him or her the meaning of a political document that governs the affairs of the nation in the space age? Are there any risks that this quaint American ritual will travel to the Antipodes and capture the imagination of Australia's judges in the task of interpreting the Australian Constitution? (Brest, 1980)

These were some of the controversies about constitutional interpretation which were debated recently in Auckland, New Zealand at a conference on constitutionalism. Justice Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States and Justice Binney of the Supreme Court of Canada gave different answers. The former is probably the "most eloquent expositor"3 of the modern theory of originalism. He believes that, of its nature, a written Constitution has a fixed meaning which does not change with time and that such meaning is the same as the words signified when the Constitution was first adopted. Justice Binney, recently appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, was called upon to answer the criticisms implicitly directed by his United States colleague to the process of elaboration of the Canadian Constitution and its Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms. It was in the context of defending the Canadian approach to that task, that Justice Binney let slip the opinion (which he suggested was held by some Canadian judges) that the approach of their counterparts in the United States could only be explained by appreciating that Americans were engaged in a ritual of ancestor worship. (Brest, 1980)

The Constitutions of the United States of America and (1776-1790); Canada (1867); and Australia (1901) are amongst the three most enduring of such documents in the world today. But what do they mean? The question of constitutional interpretation arises at the very threshold of every case in which the constitutional text must be elucidated. The text of the Australian Constitution - like that of the United States and Canada - is written in language which is brief, sometimes obscure and ...