What is the concept of legislative history? How can legislative history assist a legal researcher? What have been or are the limitations of legislative history research with regard to statutory interpretation?
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Legislative history includes any of various materials generated in the course of creating legislation, such as committee reports, analysis by legislative counsel, committee hearings, floor debates, and histories of actions taken. Legislative history is used for discovering sources of information about a legislature’s intent in enacting a law.
How can legislative history assist a legal researcher?
Because legal researchers can observe what was the mindset and research that led for the legislative body to decide on that law. Regardless if the law was not passed, it can still be observed for future research. Further, it also provides future legislative bodies opportunities to observe the previous thinking process and what could have been different
What have been or are the limitations of legislative history research with regard to statutory interpretation?
” limitations have been explored by legal scholar Robert John Araujo, S.J. Araujo has argued that legislative history “cannot be relied on to define what the authors [of a statute] intended in every factual context.” While legislative history is not a reliable guide to the meaning of the precise terminology used in a statute,234 it can be a useful source of information to determine a statute’s purpose, understood as the “results of the text and what it may achieve.” While legislative history may, in Araujo’s view, be seen “in part” as a legal fiction, it is a useful one for discerning the “teleological dimension” of a statute.”
What this means is that interpretation of legislative history can affect how interpretation of statutory is to be applied. Sometime to negative effects as legislative history can make for unconstitutional results.
references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislative_history
https://udayton.edu/law/_resources/documents/law_review/vol39_no1/6-deforrest.pdf