A Practice Guide to Interpreting Statutes for Business Professionals

This article gives business professionals practical strategies for reading and interpreting statutes. Statutes affect the average business professional on a daily basis, making it crucial for professionals to be able interpret statutes at a basic level. The authors outline an approach to interpreting statutes, which ultimately exposes the statute's components known as elements, factors, results, and/or exceptions. The authors provide practical tips to reading a statute to ensure the reader adequately understands the statute. The approach uses headings to the reader’s advantage to navigate through the statute and suggests reading through the text of statute multiple times. The authors then encourage readers to identify commonly-used words in statutes such as “and,” “or,” “may,” “except,” and “shall.” and define other statute-specific words. The goal of the approach is to dissect the statute into smaller, more understandable subparts to gain an accurate interpretation of the statute’s components.