Original Intent and Legal Interpretation

Author granted license

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1999

ISSN

1440-4982

Publisher

Australian Society of Legal Philosophy

Language

En-US

Abstract

A judge or lawyer who wants to determine how a law should be applied will often refer to the "intentions" of the lawmakers. Judicial opinions, legal briefs, and scholars' writings seek guidance from what the lawmakers intended their laws to achieve (intended purposes) or how the lawmakers intended their laws to apply (contemplated applications). The idea is encapsulated in passages like the following: It is a familiar canon of construction that a thing which is within the intention of the makers of a statute is as much within the statute as if it were within the letter; and a thing which is within the letter of the statute is not within the statute, unless it be within the intention of the makers. A similar idea is employed in US constitutional adjudication. It is applied to written law generally.

This document is currently not available here.

Find on SSRN

Please note the file available on SSRN may not be the final published version of this work.

Link to Publisher Site (BU Community Subscription)

Share

COinS