This is no the favored theory, of courts :
legislatures of as the legitimate source of policy decisions, and the courts is said to be to carry out what the legislatures have said (and therefor presumptively wanted).
It is only very rarely that any court will ever overtly deviate from a stature-the case report are full of statements avowing acquiescence to statutory directions .
In America, this maxim of statutory interpretation is often called the plain meaning rule.
In English, that is some time call the rule of literal interpretation.
But just as some courts will choose not really to follow past case precedent(while other will nearly always follow it, regardless of their own policy wishes) so too will some court in fact engage in substantial deviation from apparent statutory requirement.
This is usually accomplished through a subtle process of interpretation or a mysterious divination of what the legislature's "intent" in enacting the statute in question must have been.
Some American courts call this the "legislative purpose" rule, and suggest looking not only at the words of the statute but also its legislative history (such as statements made on the floor or committee reports, if these have been published) and even at the history of the time and the social or economic mischief the statute was designed to remedy.
English courts have labeled this process of seeking to find the legislative policy purpose behind a statute as the "golden rule" of interpretation.