legal orders.As an example, the scope will be briefly extended towards American law, where the basic legitimacy of any use of legislative history is still questioned.6 A powerful assault against the use of legislative history has been launched by the school of (new) textualism, led by A. Scalia, a Justice of the US Supreme Court.7The basic idea is that judges should not look for legislative intent when interpreting statutes, but should follow the objective meaning of the law as closely as possible. It seems, however, that the main purpose of textualism is to combat the use of legislative history, and the rejection of legislative intent is only an excuse for this. Scalia argued that even if legislative intent was to be a guiding factor when interpreting statutes, legislative history should still not be used as a source of knowledge.The reason is that legislative history is an unreliable source of information. It is made up of contradictory voices and thrown back and forth at different stages in the course of legislation. Legislative history serves the internal needs of the legislator, whose primary task is to pass new statutes. It is not created to serve the needs of lawyers and judges.Their function is to interpret those statutes.This argument plainly refers to the form and content of legislative history, and thus indirectly to the legislative technique chosen by the legislator. Does this reduce the value of Scalia’s assertion? Is Scalia’s criticism relevant only to a special American form of legislative history? The criticism goes beyond this. Even if legislative history were proved to have a normative content, and be potentially useful in statutory interpretation, it still represents a descriptive record of a decision-making process and, as such,mainly political material. Legislative history inevitably consists of several parts, each one with a different content. It therefore invites judges to arrive at whatever interpretations they choose, depending on which part of that material accords with their own personal points of view.8 Legislative history therefore creates confusion re cht swi s s e n scha f t al s j ur i st i sch e dok t r i n 198 6 There is still no single, coherent theory of statutory interpretation in American law.There are at least three different theories: intentionalist, textualist and dynamic theories, according toW. Eskridge, Ph. Frickey, E. Garrett, Legislation and Statutory Interpretation, 2nd ed., NewYork 2006, p. 219f. 7 A. Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation - Federal Courts and the Law, Princeton1997.My description of Scalia’s arguments is based on this essay. 8 “What is most exasperating about the use of legislative history ... is that it does not even make sense for those who accept legislative intent as the criterion. It is much more likely to produce a false or contrived legislative intent than a genuine one”, Scalia p. 32. “In any major piece of legislation, the legislative history is extensive,
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