Friday, September 28, 2012
Drakeman on Original Meaning, Original Intent, and Religious Liberty
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/09/drakeman-on-original-meaning-original-intent-and-religious-liberty.html
Comments
Mark,
There's some defense of it across the pond, at least in the statutory interpretation context. Oxford's Richard Ekins, for example, has a new book coming out from OUP on the topic ("The Nature of Legislative Intent"). He has some interesting responses to Waldron/Dworkin/Scalia's skepticism of collective intent. (Now who would have expected those three to be lumped together?)
Posted by: Jeff Pojanowski | Sep 28, 2012 8:49:41 PM
Jeff, thanks very much, I will look for the book. On the question of collective intent, a neat thing is that that question comes up in criminal law in the context of conspiratorial liability. Similar kinds of questions of divining group intent and the legitimacy of ascribing a single intent to a group arise. Sometimes I wonder whether there has been a paper studying the issue across the two disciplines (probably there has been).
Posted by: Marc DeGirolami | Sep 29, 2012 7:10:35 AM
Mark,
There's definitely some interesting overlap there, especially since part of the intentionalist's response to the many minds problem of collective intent is to identify a higher-order intent/commitment to the intended decisions of sub-parts of the body (drafters, committee members, etc.) even when you do not subjectively know the subjective intent of that other constituent part. You see the same thing in conspiracy (intentionalist's may even draw that analogy). Ekins' short article "Legislative Intent Law's Empire" in Ratio Juris lays the groundwork for such an argument and is much shorter than a book.
Posted by: Jeff Pojanowski | Sep 29, 2012 11:00:50 PM
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.