Legislative Intent and Acting Intentionally

Abstract

An experiment reveals a distinction between ordinary judgment of what legislators did intentionally and ordinary judgment of 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.