What consequences follow from the fact that Ramsay is no more and no less than an approach to statutory construction? Jolyon Maugham argues that a keen appreciation of that fact is decisive if one is properly to determine whether a statutory test is met.
To that (one suspects theoretical) historian of the Ramsay doctrine history plays out as a succession of gnomic judicial pronouncements upon the interpretation of which vast sums of money were won or lost. The (less theoretical) analyst of its modern day legacy – that reader of the tea leaves the tax litigator – owes a debt of gratitude to the seminal speech of Ribeiro PJ in Collector of Stamp Revenue v Arrowtown Assets Ltd [2003] HKCFA 46 which recast the doctrine in familiar legal terms. In that case...
