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On the Structure and Stock Issues of Legislative Justification (in Parliamentary Debates)

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Exploring the Province of Legislation

Part of the book series: Legisprudence Library ((LEGIS,volume 9))

Abstract

Within a lawmaking process, parliamentary debates are ideally supposed to be a major place for advancing and discussing legislative arguments. If taken seriously, this ideal expectation urges the question of whether MPs can actually justify their enactments by arguing, i.e. by giving and exchanging reasons for and against legislation, and how we could possibly ascertain the quality of their argumentation. This chapter suggests a structural account of statutory justification (as contained in debate minutes) which might be used to assess legislative deliberations in parliament. After some preliminary remarks, I introduce the gist of a legisprudential approach to the analysis and evaluation of parliamentary debate of bills. A key aspect of this approach concerns the implicit structure of justification underlying legislative deliberation, a structure that may be conceived of as a special variant of value-based teleological argument. In order to grasp it, I will sketch a basic model of legislative teleology (which loosely draws on the principle of proportionality). This model serves as a basis for two evaluation tools that can help us to inspect the legisprudential quality of parliamentary debate: an argument scheme, i.e. an inferential structure capturing the essentials of legislative justification; and a set of critical questions or stock issues that elected lawmakers should tackle when debating bills. Both tools, in turn, can eventually be utilised to further evaluate parliamentary debates in terms of deliberative thoroughness and of plausibility of legislative reasons.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Of course, this is not the only similarity between both areas: parallels between legislators (legislatures, lawmaking processes) and judges (courts, trials) are almost a classic topic in legal thinking (cf. e.g. Horack 1937, 1938).

  2. 2.

    On the intertwinement between norm justification and norm application, see e.g. Alexy (1995), pp. 52 ff., critically commenting on K. Gunther’s controversial contradistinction between these practices.

  3. 3.

    Conduction is taken here as a form of arguing where a ‘conclusion is drawn from both positive and negative considerations’ (Wellman 1971, p. 57). Cf. Govier (2010), p. 352 ff. and Fairclough (2018), pp. 297 ff. As to the implications of legislative dissensus for statutory interpretation, see e.g. Nourse (2016), pp. 64 ff. or Sehl (2019), pp. 151 ff.

  4. 4.

    Cf. e.g. Gartz (2015), pp. 45–46: ‘Die Begründungs des Gesetzes umfasst alles Dokumentierte, also sowohl Hinweise im Gesetz, als auch in allen Materialien, die über angenommene Tatsachen, Regelungsanlässe, Absichten, Intentionen, Zielvorstellungen und Motivationen Auskunft geben’.

  5. 5.

    Whether legisprudence neglects the public or civic side of legislative justification (Bello-Hutt 2021, p. 200) is debatable; cf. e.g. Oliver-Lalana (2005a), pp. 254–255.

  6. 6.

    Among many others, see e.g. Waldron (2006), as well as Mill (2001), pp. 54 ff.

  7. 7.

    Pound (1908, pp. 405–406) already counselled to be ‘more cautious in criticizing the legislature,’ noting that ‘crudity and carelessness have too often characterized […] lawmaking both legislative and judicial’ and ‘do not inhere necessarily in the one any more than in the other.’ In the same vein, Cohen (1956, p. 389) challenged four notions that ‘seem to dominate the account of the legislative process: (1) that those in control of it will respond only to the interests of dominant private pressure groups; (2) that […] argument and persuasion serve no useful function; (3) that force (power of the stronger) is the only real arbiter of group conflicts; and (4) that […] rational criteria for dealing with conflicts between competing private group interests are unavailable. Because these views furnish the basis for much of the current attitude towards the practice of legislative law’, one should ‘determine whether they are products of a mind’s eye in focus, or whether they suffer from distortion and exaggeration.’ As to legislative debates, however, Cohen (1952, pp. 35–36) was rather sceptical. Cf. Luce (1922), p. 316: ‘the common charge that nearly all of debate is a waste of time, useless garrulity, vain mouthing, is based on a complete misconception of both the purpose and the nature of legislative argument.’

  8. 8.

    With some adaptations, my approach is largely based on Atienza’s (1997, 1992) multi-level model of legislative rationality—with an eye on the works of A. La Spina, J. Habermas, K. Tuori, L. Wintgens, or J. Waldron, among others.

  9. 9.

    On the symmetry between making and construing statutes, see recently e.g. Krell (2018, p. 132), recalling that legisprudence, ‘when filtered through judging, [...] becomes statutory interpretation’.

  10. 10.

    On legislative rights review and constitutional interpretation by MPs, see e.g. Hiebert (2012), Fisher (1985), Pickerill (2004), Tushnet (2009) or, more recently, Jackson (2016) and Appleby and Olijnyk (2018).

  11. 11.

    Similarly, Agne (2011), pp. 161–162; cf. also Walton (1998), p. 245: ‘An answer to a question can be locally irrelevant to the question it was a reply to’ but may have ‘global relevance to the ultimate conclusion at issue’.

  12. 12.

    As noted, debate minutes are regarded here as a distillate or concentrate of a larger process of legislative justification This means that reconstruction and analysis require connecting MPs’ deliberation to the rest of justificatory materials within or even surrounding the lawmaking proceedings, inasmuch as these are directly or indirectly resorted to in parliamentary speeches. Insofar as debates are a non-self-sufficient source of legislative justification, their evaluation must also take external information and evidence into account (Sect. 5).

  13. 13.

    For an overview, see Bächtiger (2014, 2018), Quirk and Bendix (2011) or Bächtiger et al. (2018). See also Bächtiger and Beste (2017), Mucciaroni and Quirk (2006, 2010), Steiner et al. (2004), Tschentscher et al. (2010), Steiner (2012), Lord (2013) or Lord and Tamvaki (2013). On the argumentative turn in public policy analysis, see Hansson and Hirsch Hadorn (2016), or Fischer and Forester (1993).

  14. 14.

    See especially Ihnen (2012, 2017), Fairclough (2016, 2018) and Fairclough and Fairclough (2012).

  15. 15.

    With at least two felicitous exceptions coming from the fields of pragmadialectics (Ihnen 2017) and political discourse analysis (Fairclough 2016, 2018). C. Ihnen has suggested a specific set of critical questions to evaluate the sufficiency of the justification of government bills as discussed in the first reading on the floor of the Chilean congress. Her questions cover, inter alia, moral, political, constitutional, and feasibility aspects—yet, the pragmatic argumentation scheme she uses remains unspecific. On her part, I. Fairclough combines critical discourse analysis and argumentation theory to develop a specific deliberation scheme, but her critical questions only indirectly include legisprudential items. On the evaluative use of schemes and critical questions, see below Sects. 3.2 and 4.

  16. 16.

    A theory built on the participant perspective, i.e. on the internal point of view of lawmakers who take their job seriously (Oliver-Lalana and Wintgens 2019).

  17. 17.

    To name but only two shortcomings: the proposal is designed for a generic or standard context of legislation (a good evaluation method should adapt to a variety of contexts, but this requires a typology of laws and legislative scenarios I lack); and it is limited to the moment of enactment, i.e. it assumes an ex ante perspective on legislation (whereas evaluation should incorporate retrospective elements, for one key tenet of legisprudence is that legislative justification must be seen as an ongoing practice: see Wintgens 2012, pp. 267 ff. and 302–303).

  18. 18.

    Figure 1 above displays first-order reasons only, but usually these reasons are, in turn, claims sustained by (i.e. conclusions resulting from) second-order reasons and considerations. MPs themselves may exhaust or saturate this second-order justification, but they can also offer it by implicitly or explicitly referring to external materials. In this connection, the richer or deeper the justification is, the greater the informative value of legislative argumentation—also for the purposes of constitutional and statutory interpretation: cf. already Freund (1926, p. 316), noting that ‘congressional debates sometimes throw a valuable light on the legal aspects of legislation’.

  19. 19.

    Cf. e.g. Brest (1975), Tushnet (2009), or Mendes da Rocha (2010).

  20. 20.

    See Johnson (2000), and, for legal contexts, Atienza (2006) or Weinberger (1989), pp. 381 ff.

  21. 21.

    I am using ‘dialectical’ in a loose sense covering also indirect argumentative interchanges during the whole debate series—hence the word ‘deliberative’ in parentheses. The term ‘thoroughness’ might be replaced with ‘correctness’ if the latter is not understood as ‘substantial’ plausibility but as ‘dialectical’ correctness.

  22. 22.

    Cf. e.g. Mendes da Rocha (2010, pp. 132–133), stressing the gradability of legislative deliberation quality.

  23. 23.

    See e.g. Hirst v. UK (No. 2), ECtHR 6 Dec 2005, para 79; or Alajos Kiss v. Hungary, ECtHR 20 May 2010, para 41.

  24. 24.

    But I do not think that this ‘internal’ justification can straightforwardly be described as balancing (see Atienza 2019, p. 202, suggesting that ‘perhaps it may even be said that balancing is something like the internal justification scheme of legislative argumentation’, i.e. ‘the legislative counterpart of judicial syllogism’).

  25. 25.

    Legislation is ‘teleological, purposive creation of law’, ‘goal-directed social behaviour’; ‘when the lawgiver makes an evaluative decision, this means that he regards a certain final result as worth advancing, i.e. as good’, ‘wants certain final states to be realized’ and ‘deems lawmaking as a means for achieving them. The talk about evaluative decisions can thus […] be rendered into the language of teleology’ (Aarnio 1983, pp. 245–247). Cf. Weinberger (1989), p. 278 ff. On the teleological nature of legislation, Zitelmann (1904), pp. 7 ff. and, recently, Zamboni (2017) or Kornhauser (2018).

  26. 26.

    The intricacies of legislative balancing cannot be discussed here (see e.g. Sieckmann 2016, 2019). Elsewhere (Oliver-Lalana 2021) I have characterised legislative balancing as a threefold legisprudential duty. Roughly, lawmakers must first weigh arguments justifying the occasion for legislative intervention against those for legislative inaction, i.e. for maintaining the pre-existing legal framework; second, they must weigh arguments justifying the choice of the modality of intervention amongst a pool of regulatory options; and third, they must evaluate the proportionality of the proposed statutory content in the light of a comparative assessment of alternative contents.

  27. 27.

    ‘An argument scheme is an abstract characterization of the way in which in a particular type of argumentation a premise used in support of a standpoint is related to that standpoint in order to bring about a transfer of acceptance from that premise to the standpoint. Depending on the kind of relationship that is established in the argument scheme, specific kinds of evaluative questions—usually referred to as critical questions—are appropriate to evaluate the argumentation. The critical questions that are associated with an argument scheme capture the specific pragmatic rationale for bringing about the transition of acceptance from the premise to the standpoint. Thus the argument scheme that is used in a specific type of argumentation defines, as it were, how the ‘internal organization’ of the argumentation is to be judged’ (van Eemeren et al. 2014, p. 19).

  28. 28.

    In the field of public policy argumentation and advocacy, one finds approaches that come close to this evaluative use of argument schemes and critical questions: cf. e.g. Rybacki and Rybacki (1996), pp. 191 ff. or Dalton and Butler (2015), pp. 25 ff., 42 ff.

  29. 29.

    Cf. Cohen (1952), pp. 34–35: introducing a bill ‘involves a complex of at least three distinct elements’: ‘first of all, that the author of the proposal assumes the existence of a fact situation, the correction of which is sought on the legislative level; secondly, that the method advanced for dealing with the situation is believed to be an appropriate method or means for bringing about an immediate end or goal; thirdly, that the immediate end sought would be instrumental in achieving an even higher or more inclusive end or goal. These constituent elements—the present fact situation, the means-ends hypothesis, the instrumental value judgment, together constitute the very essence of a legislative proposal. […] [A] bill would be defective and thus vulnerable to attack if the assumptions which underlie any one or all of the three constituent elements would be found wanting. In the same way, a judicial decision would be defective when a law would be applied to an erroneous set of facts—when, for example; a criminal statute making it unlawful to take the life of another human would be applied with full sanction to one who really did not commit the act. In the legislative realm, what would result would be a non-realization of a value goal; in the judicial, it would be a denial of justice’. Cf. however Linde (1976), pp. 222 ff.

  30. 30.

    This is an amended version of the list of CQs presented in Oliver-Lalana (2018). Here I dispense with distinctions (and related argumentation-theoretical discussions) about different ways of questioning arguments, and simply connect questions to premises or sub-premises. Let me just remark that objections may not only affect individual premises but also the very conclusion, showing that it is untenable and should therefore be abandoned. In legislative debates, CQs normally come up not as questions but as objections or as counterarguments (undercutters or rebuttals)—yet, they may also be formulated as genuine questions, i.e. as simple requests for reasons or justification for one of the premises.

  31. 31.

    These CQs are inspired by the sequential model of proportionality, but do not preclude resorting to other accounts of proportionality, particularly as far as social rights are concerned (cf. Clérico 2018, pp. 32 ff., or Bernal 2017, pp. 497 ff.).

  32. 32.

    Actually, once we have a scheme for legislative justification and a matching set of critical questions, a legisprudential approach could further profit from the wide range of analysis, evaluation, and modelling possibilities that argumentation and discourse analysis scholars derive from these tools.

  33. 33.

    In argumentation theory, there is discussion about what the arguer’s dialectical obligations are and when they can be said to have been discharged (see e.g. Johnson 2000, pp. 332–333, Johnson 2003, p. 49; cf. Blair 2012, pp. 3 ff.). Nor is it clear how strong the burden of proof should be for bill proponents (cf. Walton 2015, pp. 215 ff).

  34. 34.

    Critical questions are iterative and remain open until the end of debate. By the same token, MPs can improve their knowledge on the legislative scenario until the final voting. Cf. Walton (2015), pp. 180–181.

  35. 35.

    On adequacy as a criterion for dialectical correctness, see e.g. Johnson (2003), p. 49; cf. also van Eemeren et al. (2014), pp. 385 ff., Blair (2012), pp. 87 ff.; on the pertinence criterion, see e.g. Santibáñez (2011), pp. 453 ff.

  36. 36.

    In legisprudential terms, the mere occurrence of fallacious moves needs not necessarily lead to a negative appraisal of deliberations: rather, the true problem arises when fallacies are not corrected or go unchallenged (Laehn 2004).

  37. 37.

    Even if amendments are the price to be paid in return for parliamentary support, or if they are the result of secret bargaining or informal negotiation between parliamentary parties or party leaders, MPs will normally offer some public justification when debating the bill.

  38. 38.

    An evaluator may well use CQs directly to assess, on her own, the substantial correctness or plausibility of each of the premises of the scheme. But before proceeding to this layer of evaluation, one should first consider what MPs have actually justified and how.

  39. 39.

    Actually, Mucciaroni and Quirk (2006, 2010) combine an epistemic with a dialectic or deliberative assessment. After rating ‘effect claims’ as supported, partially supported or unsupported, they establish debate intelligence by calculating claim rebuttals, concessions and reassertions. Cf. also Esterling’s (2011) approach to the evaluation of the plausibility of expert testimony in parliamentary hearings.

  40. 40.

    When there is a lack of clear evidence as to the correctness or reliability of legislative premises, one could focus on whether the process by which they have been arrived at meets basic criteria of methodological quality. For example, the German Federal Constitutional Court sometimes assesses the plausibility of legislative diagnoses and prognoses by inspecting whether these were made with due care and prove ‘as reliable as possible’, thereby requiring lawmakers to carry out a ‘sufficient’, ‘essentially complete’ or even ‘as complete as possible’ fact-finding, not to overlook any ‘weighty’ or ‘relevant’ fact; and to ‘exhaust’ the ‘available’ knowledge sources and to ‘make use of’ all materials ‘within reach’ (see Oliver-Lalana 2016b and 2017).

  41. 41.

    On the representativeness of legislative argumentation, see e.g. Mendes da Rocha (2010) and, more recently, Valentini (2019). Cf. also Oliver-Lalana (2005a, b). On the double logics, ‘discursive’ and ‘positional’, of parliamentary deliberations, see Schäffer (2017), pp. 419 ff.

  42. 42.

    See Dryzek and Niemeyer (2008).

  43. 43.

    A converging criterion could be authenticity, i.e. one could look to whether legislative decisions are actually justified on behalf of all citizens and promote the general good, or, rather, are the result of legislative capture and (spurious) special interests. Quality discourse indexes (the most detailed instruments developed so far to evaluate parliamentary deliberations) include specific indicators to measure this aspect, depending on the type of interests conveyed through MPs’ arguments: ‘Do speakers cast their justifications in terms of common good conceptions or of narrow group/constituency interests?’ (Tschentscher et al. 2010, p. 26); ‘How far do representatives justify their views with reference to notions of the public good that cover different publics, including (a) their constituents, (b) the public of the polity as a whole, or (c) all affected individuals?’ (Lord 2013, p. 252). Cf. also Steiner et al. (2004), p. 58 and Steiner (2012), p. 270.

  44. 44.

    See above Sect. 4.

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Acknowledgements

For inspiring comments and insightful criticism I am indebted to the participants in seminars and lectures at the universities of Zaragoza, Málaga, A Coruña, Alicante and Milano, as well as in the Legisprudence Workshop held at the 29th IVR World Congress in Luzern. A special word of gratitude goes for Francesco Ferraro, Silvia Zorzetto, Manuel Atienza, José Luis Díez Ripollés, and José Antonio Seoane. The preparation of this chapter was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science (Project RTI2018-095843-B-I00, MCIU/AEI/FEDER-UE) and the University of Zaragoza’s Legal Sociology Lab (Research Group Strategy of the Government of Aragon).

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  1. Facultad de Derecho, Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

    A. Daniel Oliver-Lalana

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  1. A. Daniel Oliver-Lalana
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Correspondence to A. Daniel Oliver-Lalana .

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  1. Department of Legal Sciences “Cesare Beccaria”, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Francesco Ferraro

  2. Department of Legal Sciences “Cesare Beccaria”, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Silvia Zorzetto

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Oliver-Lalana, A.D. (2022). On the Structure and Stock Issues of Legislative Justification (in Parliamentary Debates). In: Ferraro, F., Zorzetto, S. (eds) Exploring the Province of Legislation. Legisprudence Library, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87262-5_4

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