Opinion ID: 1818687
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Legislative intent or purpose

Text: A first principle of statutory interpretation is that the words expressed in the statute are the law. Unexpressed motivations or intentions of legislators are not the law because they have not been voted on and passed by a majority of both houses of our Legislature and signed by the Governor. Courts thus lack authority to elevate unexpressed intentions above the text of the law itself. This Court has repudiated nontextual modes of interpretation. For example, in McIntire, supra, we rejected the so-called absurd result doctrine of avoiding the text of a statute when judges view the result as absurd or unjust. We agreed with Justice Scalia's description of such attempts to divine unexpressed and nontextual legislative intent as `nothing but an invitation to judicial lawmaking.'  McIntire, supra at 156, n. 2, 599 N.W.2d 102, quoting Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 21. Courts do, of course, routinely state that discerning legislative intent is the goal of statutory interpretation. The Legislature's actual intent is not, however, the true object of inquiry. Rather, courts should attempt to ascertain the legislative intent that may reasonably be inferred from the words expressed in the statute.  State Farm Fire & Casualty Co v. Old Republic Ins Co, 466 Mich. 142, 146, 644 N.W.2d 715, 717 (2002) (emphasis supplied). See also Veenstra v. Washtenaw Country Club, 466 Mich. 155, 645 N.W.2d 643 (2002). Justice Scalia has described this process accurately: The evidence suggests that, despite frequent statements to the contrary, we do not really look for subjective legislative intent. We look for a sort of objectified intent the intent that a reasonable person would gather from the text of the law, placed alongside the remainder of the corpus juris. As Bishop's old treatise nicely put it, elaborating upon the usual formulation: [T]he primary object of all rules for interpreting statutes is to ascertain the legislative intent; or, exactly, the meaning which the subject is authorized to understand the legislature intended . And the reason we adopt this objectified version is, I think, that it is simply incompatible with democratic government, or indeed, even with fair government, to have the meaning of a law determined by what the lawgiver meant, rather than by what the lawgiver promulgated. That seems to me one step worse than the trick the emperor Nero was said to engage in: posting edicts high up on the pillars, so that they could not easily be read. Government by unexpressed intent is similarly tyrannical. It is the law that governs, not the intent of the lawgiver. That seems to me the essence of the famous American ideal set forth in the Massachusetts constitution: A government of laws, not of men. Men may intend what they will; but it is only the laws that they enact which bind us. [Scalia, supra at 17 (emphasis in original).] For these reasons, I respectfully disagree with the Court of Appeals reasoning to the extent that it analyzed the purposes rather than the text of the WDCA.