Publication details
Intentions of Legislator in the Age of Social Media
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | One of the most important moments when law is linked to reality is its interpretation and application. In the context of authoritative interpretation and application of law, we can find that interpreters often refer to the legislator´s intentions. In legal scholarship, then, we associate intentionalism with the search for the intentions of the lawmaker and what he actually wanted to communicate through the text of the normative legal act. Proponents of this position argue that what is most important is what the legislator intended to communicate to us through the text of the normative legal act, what his intentions were. Intentionalists face criticism where the main arguments are that we cannot speak of the legislator as some separately existing entity that might have its own intentions. In spite of this, judges often rely on the intention of the legislator, using, for example, travaux préparatoires. Nowadays, in the age of social media and technology, it is not uncommon for lawmakers to comment on draft of acts on social media. We can thus ask whether these comments have to have any impact on the interpretation of the law. Are these comments evidence of what the legislator intended? In order to answer this question, we need to ask a more fundamental question, namely whether we can speak of the autonomous existence of a plural entity (legislator) and whether we can attribute our own intentions to this plural entity and, if so, what relation they have to the intentions of their individual members. In this paper, we will explore these questions using the insights of analytic philosophy, specifically social ontology. Answers to these questions can help us clarify what materials make sense to draw on in interpreting law and why. |
| Related projects: |