Court Opinion

ID: 9723544
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 10:19:29.936481+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:49.581694
License: Public Domain

KLINE, P. J., Concurring.
I write separately to emphasize why Leslie Salt Co. v. San Francisco Bay Conservation etc. Com. (1984) 153 Cal.App.3d 605 [200 Cal.Rptr. 575], which is heavily relied upon by the city, does not apply to this case.
*883Leslie Salt stands for the proposition that a critical word or phrase will not be judicially assigned a meaning that would defeat the clear purpose of the statute in which it appears. The city seizes upon the case, and others upon which it relies, in the course of arguing that the lower court’s interpretation of the offstreet parking ordinance involved in this case would frustrate that ordinance.
I quite agree that the furnishing of adequate offstreet parking—the purpose of the ordinance—will not be materially advanced by the trial court’s reading of the measure, which we approve; for the removal of 90 seats from a theatre used primarily on weekends and evenings will not reduce parking needs generated on weekdays by the new offices. However, as much as my colleagues or I might like to fix this problem, Leslie Salt does not authorize us to do so.
The rules of statutory construction involved in Leslie Salt permit the courts to fill in such interstices in the law as may result from the uncertainty of language employed by the legislature in the drafting of a statute. Because the power of the courts to resolve such uncertainty is so potentially far-reaching, it must be exercised with restraint. As we pointed out in Leslie Salt, a measure of imprecision is almost always inherent in the use of words. But such imprecision does not invariably or even frequently create uncertainty about what is meant in the mind of an objective person.
There was a need for judicial interpretation in Leslie Salt because of the uncertainty of specific words appearing in the McAteer-Petris Act. As we explained, “[t]he meaning of the words of a statute or, to use the alternative approach favored by many courts, the intent of the Legislature, can only be determined with reference to the context in which the words are used; that is, with reference to such purpose as may be discerned from examining the entire enactment of which the words are part.” (Leslie Salt, supra, 153 Cal.App.3d at p. 614, fn. omitted.) Leslie Salt thus recognizes that even a word of common usage which has an ordinary meaning may be ambiguous, if it is also amenable to another meaning, when adoption of the ordinary meaning would defeat the manifest intendment of the statute in which the word appears. (Accord, Friends of Mammoth v. Board of Supervisors (1972) 8 Cal.3d 247, 260 [104 Cal.Rptr. 761, 502 P.2d 1049]; Dickey v. Raisin Proration Zone No. 1 (1944) 24 Cal.2d 796, 802 [151 P.2d 505, 157 A.L.R. 324], cert. den. 324 U.S. 869 [89 L.Ed.1424, 65 S.Ct. 1013], reh. den. 325 U.S. 893 [89 L.Ed.2004,65 S.Ct. 1183].) In other words, Leslie Salt says that ascertainment of the meaning of a disputed statutory provision must commence with an ascertainment of the purpose of the entire enactment.
*884The flaw in the city’s attempt to apply the reasoning of Leslie Salt to this case lies in the fact that no provision of the offstreet parking ordinance is even arguably inimical to the purpose of the enactment. The city does not identify any assertedly ambiguous word or phrase in need of judicial clarification because it is not concerned about anything in the ordinance; what distresses the city is something that has been omitted: viz., a requirement that the proffered offset contemporaneously reduce the newly created need for offstreet parking. The city’s real complaint, in other words, is not that the meaning of a word used in the ordinance is ambiguous in any respect, as was the case in Leslie Salt, but simply that, taken as a whole, the measure is not as effective as it can be made. This problem is not one for which there is a judicial remedy. Neither Leslie Salt nor any other rule of statutory interpretation authorizes judicial emendation of an unambiguous statute thought to be in need of “improvement.” If there were such a rule, few laws would be beyond the reach of virtually unfettered judicial revision.