 Christopher Richter suggested that the majority's legalistic approach, while yielding a workable construction of the provisions of the Migration Act, resulted in a dangerous situation in this case because the Act did not specifically address the situation of stateless persons, and the literal approach did not allow for gaps in the legislation to be filled. Matthew Zagor suggests that there are various assumptions about the constitutional relationship between the branches of government implicit in these two different approaches. He argues that the majority, particularly Justice Callinan, preferred the plain meaning of the Migration Act because for them "the key principle at play is simple: the Court should not frustrate Parliament's purpose or obstruct the executive." Zagor also comments on the irony that the supposedly legalistic conclusion reached by the majority is at odds with a prior High Court decision led by Australia's most prominent legalist, Chief Justice Owen Dixon, in which he implied a temporal limit onto World War II era legislation which also included a scheme of executive detention.
