Legislation Commons^™

The Two Kinds Of Legislative Intent, Steve R. Johnson

Scholarly Publications

What is a court trying to do when it interprets or applies a statute? This installment of my column looks at two different answers to that question, doing so through the lens of cases involving state and local tax statutes. Both approaches sometimes use the language of “intent,” so it becomes important for the state-local tax practitioner to understand, and to accommodate his or her arguments to the kind of intent that actually controls in the particular jurisdiction.

The first part describes the two approaches: subjective intent and objectified intent. The second part describes a middle position that some courts …