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29 Law & Phil. 1 (2010)

handle is hein.journals/lwphil29 and id is 1 raw text is: Law and Philosophy (2010) 29:1-29 © Springer 2009 DOI 10.1007/s10982-009-9048-z JAMES A. E. MACPHERSON LEGISLATIVE INTENTIONALISM AND PROXY AGENCY* (Accepted 17 March 2009) I. INTRODUCTION Legislation is sometimes vague or ambiguous. For this reason - and perhaps for others - it is often claimed that there is no single objective and determinate way to apply legislation to particular cases or issues. This indeterminacy creates obvious problems for those required to interpret legislation: they must decide whether to apply legislation in cases of inde- terminacy, and if they decide to apply it, there may be more than one way to do so. There are a number of different views about the methods interpreters should use, but a view commonly called 'inten- tionalism' has traditionally been the most influential.1 Inten- tionalism can be described as the view that a piece of legislation should be interpreted in accordance with the intentions of the * I would like to thank Daniel Farrell and Donald Hubin for discussions and advice on earlier drafts on this paper. I would also like to thank the anonymous referee for Law and Philosophy for a number of helpful suggestions. 1 John F. Manning claims that intentionalism was the orthodoxy amongst federal judges for much of the last century, though textualism has been increasingly influential recently ('Textualism and Legislative Intent', Virginia Law Review 91 (2005): 419-450). Amongst academics, intention- alism may not have been the orthodoxy, but it has certainly had adherents - for a recent defense, see Solan, Lawrence M., 'Private Language, Public Laws: The Central Role of Legislative Intent in Statutory Interpretation', Georgetown Law Journal 93 (2005): 427-486. I share with Solan a general focus on the intentions of some members of legislatures only, although I disagree with Solan about the justification for that focus.