Kevin Tobia (Georgetown University Law Center, Georgetown University - Department of Philosophy) has published "Legislative Intent and Acting Intentionally" on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
An experiment reveals a distinction between ordinary judgment of what legislators did "intentionally" and ordinary judgment of "legislative intent." The former reflects the well-known side-effect effect: bad effects are deemed more intentional than good ones. However, this pattern disappears in judgments of legislative intent: bad outcomes are not evaluated as more legislatively intended than good ones. For ordinary people, a law's legislative intent is not simply what its drafters did intentionally.
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