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Legislative intent
Legislative intent is a practice used by judges, lawyers and other court officials to determine the goals of legislators at the time of a bill's passage. This practice involves reviewing the plain language of a legislative act as well as debate transcripts, available drafts and committee notes related to the act. The use of more detailed research into legislative intent can stem from vague or general language that does not address the matter at hand.[1][2]
Applications
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has argued that legislative intent is an important tool for judges and provides an alternative to less consistent forms of legal interpretation.[3] Breyer explained his views on legislative intent in an interview with National Public Radio in 2010:
| “ |
I think we're following an intention by people who wrote this document — Madison, Adams, Washington, Hamilton. They had an idea that they were writing a constitution and in that constitution, they would create certain institutions ... to create basically democratic systems of government protecting basic liberty. Much in the Constitution is written in a very general way. Words like 'freedom of speech' do not define themselves. Nor does the word 'liberty.' And what they intended with these very basic values, in a document, [was that they] would last for hundreds of years. So they had values that changed but little, while the application of those values changes as circumstances change. [4] |
” |
| —Stephen Breyer (2010)[5] | ||
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has criticized the use of legislative intent at various points in his career. Scalia believes that legislative intent research ends at arbitrary points, relies on documents that do not represent legally binding language and does not capture the intent of all who voted on measures. In Green v. Bock Laundry Machine Co. (1989), Scalia wrote the following in his opinion:
| “ |
The meaning of terms on the statute books ought to be determined, not on the basis of which meaning can be shown to have been understood by a larger handful of the Members of Congress; but rather on the basis of which meaning is (1) most in accord with context and ordinary usage, and thus most likely to have been understood by the whole Congress which voted on the words of the statute (not to mention the citizens subject to it), and (2) most compatible with the surrounding body of law into which the provision must be integrated - a compatibility which, by a benign fiction, we assume Congress always has in mind.[4] |
” |
| —Antonin Scalia (1989)[3] | ||
See also
Footnotes
- ↑ Georgetown Law Library, "Legislative History Research Guide," accessed January 4, 2016
- ↑ Law Librarians' Society of Washington, DC, "Federal Legislative History Research: A Practitioner's Guide to Compiling the Documents and Sifting for Legislative Intent," 2001
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Marquette Law Review, "Legislative History: The Philosophies of Justices Scalia and Breyer and the Use of Legislative History by the Wisconsin State Courts," Fall 1996
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
- ↑ National Public Radio, "Justice Breyer: The Court, The Cases and Conflicts," September 14, 2010
