In law

Law

Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...

, the legislative intent of the legislature

Legislature

A legislature is a kind of deliberative assembly with the power to pass, amend, and repeal laws. The law created by a legislature is called legislation or statutory law. In addition to enacting laws, legislatures usually have exclusive authority to raise or lower taxes and adopt the budget and...

 in enacting legislation

Legislation

Legislation is law which has been promulgated by a legislature or other governing body, or the process of making it...

 may sometimes be considered by the judiciary

Judiciary

The judiciary is the system of courts that interprets and applies the law in the name of the state. The judiciary also provides a mechanism for the resolution of disputes...

 when interpreting the law (see judicial interpretation

Judicial interpretation

Judicial interpretation is a theory or mode of thought that explains how the judiciary should interpret the law, particularly constitutional documents and legislation...

). The judiciary may attempt to assess legislative intent where legislation is ambiguous, or does not appear to directly or adequately address a particular issue, or when there appears to have been a legislative drafting error

Legislative drafting error

Drafting errors sometimes occur in legislation. Usually these errors are minor, such as incorrect punctuation or capitalization, and the meaning is unaffected. But sometimes the matter is more substantive....

.

When a statute is clear and unambiguous, the courts have said, repeatedly, that the inquiry into legislative intent ends at that point. It is only when a statute could be interpreted in more than one fashion that legislative intent must be inferred from sources other than the actual text of the statute.

Sources of legislative intent

Courts frequently look to the following sources in attempting to determine the goals and purposes that the legislative body had in mind when it passed the law:

• the text of the bill as proposed to the legislative body
• amendments to the bill that were proposed and accepted or rejected,
• the record of hearings on the topic
• legislative records or journals
• speeches and floor debate made prior to the vote on the bill
• legislative subcommittee minutes, factual findings, and/or reports
• other relevant statutes that can be used to understand the definitions in the statute on question
• other relevant statutes which indicate the limits of the statute in question
• legislative files of the executive branch, such as the governor or president
• case law
  Case law
  In law, case law is the set of reported judicial decisions of selected appellate courts and other courts of first instance which make new interpretations of the law and, therefore, can be cited as precedents in a process known as stare decisis...
  
   prior to the statute or following it which demonstrates the problems the legislature was attempting to address with the bill
• constitutional determinations (Would Congress still have passed certain sections of a statute had it known about the constitutional invalidity of the other portions of the statute?)
• legislative intent, which is the reason for passing the law

Application of legislative intent

Courts in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 and elsewhere have developed a number of principles for handling such evidence of legislative intent; as an example, many courts have suggested that the comments of those opposing a bill under consideration should be treated with skepticism, on the principle that opponents of a bill may often exaggerate its practical consequences.

One early example of an important Supreme Court case which relied on legislative intent was W.O. Johnson v. Southern Pacific Co. (1904) 196 U.S. 1, where the court decided that a man may sue the railroad for failing to have an automatic coupler since the legislature was attempting to remedy the problem of multiple injuries by railroad coupling.

Others, most notably United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

Antonin Scalia

Antonin Gregory Scalia is an American jurist who serves as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. As the longest-serving justice on the Court, Scalia is the Senior Associate Justice...

, have objected generally to the use of such evidence, rather than reliance on the literal language of the statute, arguing that such evidence of "legislative intent" is often created by proponents of a bill to persuade a court to interpret the statute in a way that they were not able to persuade the legislative body to adopt when passing the bill.

These principles of legislative intent often overlap with those principles of statutory construction

Statutory interpretation

Statutory interpretation is the process by which courts interpret and apply legislation. Some amount of interpretation is always necessary when a case involves a statute. Sometimes the words of a statute have a plain and straightforward meaning. But in many cases, there is some ambiguity or...

that courts have developed to interpret ambiguous or incomplete legislation. As an example, the principle that courts should not interpret a statute to produce absurd or unintended results will often be informed by evidence of what the proponents of a bill stated about the objectives to be achieved by the statute.