Role of Legislative History in Legal Interpretation

Simply speaking legislative history is the history with regard passage of a particular legislation. It includes: the government's statement of reasons for a bill and the legislative antecedents statutory provision under consideration; pre parliamentary materials relating to the or the statute in which it is contained, such as reports of and commissions reviewing the existing law and recommending and; parliamentary materials such as the floor debates in the legislature. In our legal system, the validity of the legislative history in legal interpretation is somehow considered as unquestionable presupposition. Therefore, the institutions responsible for interpretation, including the Council of Guardian, feel committed to it. Despite the role of legislative history in legal interpretations, its nature, types and criteria are unclear and unresolved. In this article, I first provide a precise definition of legislative history and its types, and then try to convince you that any reference to legislative history in interpretations is misleading. For, first, there is no such thing as the intention of the legislature to make legislative history a means of collecting it; Secondly, assuming the existence of the intention of the legislator, such a thing is not accessible to the interpreter, and thirdly, assuming that it is accessible, the search of the intention of the legislator through the legislative history has no unconstitutional.