Francesca Poggi and Francesco Ferraro, ‘From the Ideal Legislator to the Competent Speaker: Uncovering theDeception in Legislative Intent’, 15 Jurisprudence 464 (2024). What lies behind one of our most engrained and persistent assumptions in law – the existence of a specific kind of intention underlying the utterances of an authority? This is the question that Poggi and Ferraro endeavour to address in this article, and in doing so, they embark on a particularly complex enterprise: to show that what we call ‘legislative intent’ is a deception. Or, put differently: that what we call ‘legislative intent’ does not exist as such, but (only) as a construction by the interpreters; and therefore, that the invocation of ‘legislative intent’ to justify a specific interpretation of a legal text is a sleight of hand that conceals – and, even more, amplifies – the interpreters’ discretion. And all this is done under the guise of objective linguistic rationality and strict respect and deference for the legislator’s decisions … (more)
[Julieta Rabanos, JOTWELL, 21 November 2025]
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