Comment by jaza
2 months ago
That would be against the separation of powers doctrine inherent in all Western democracies. The job of the legislature is to write the law. The job of the judiciary is to interpret the law.
Besides, when the law is ambiguous, it's very often because the legislature themselves weren't sure what they intended, and/or because the legislature had deeply divided views and arrived at ambiguous wording as a compromise, and/or because the legislature used their "somebody else's problem" prerogative i.e. they said "let's leave that for the courts to decide". Ambiguously worded laws isn't a bug, it's a feature!
I don't see how it could break separation of powers, especially if a legislator could provide minutes and/or a paper trail of discussions and revisions pointing the intent in a certain direction. You know, like evidence. The legislature surely has intent while writing the law, otherwise what would be the point in trying to interpret it, and the whole thing being litigated is the authors intent. I don't think the separation of powers doctrine presupposes that the legislature has no idea what their goals are while writing laws, that would be quite an insane assumption to bake into our system, and broken by design. And in this case, I very much doubt it was left intentionally ambiguous, since FOIA was clearly intended to help people get information from obstinate government agencies. What would even be the point in writing the law if obstinate government agencies are supposed to be able to weasel around the ambiguity behind a comma? Regardless, if we are able to ask the people who spent time drafting it, we could ask. There might even be a paper trail!
First, even if we kicked all questions back to the authors, there would need to be a process for interpreting legislation when the original authors are not available—perhaps they died 200 years ago, for example. So, a judicial group is necessary for interpreting the law in any case.
Second, interpreting the law is a full-time job, and our legislators are already not doing the jobs they have. If we asked them to not do a second job on top of the one they're already in dereliction of, nothing would get done. Well, twice as much nothing would get done, if that makes sense. So, you need someone with the full-time job of interpreting the law, and it might as well be that judicial branch.
Third, legislation is often a compromise. If you go back and try to interpret what it was that people said during the debate which produced the language at issue, you'd have to decide whose voices carried the most weight, which seems very, very tricky. It's why legislation is written down in the first place: a single source of truth. Even if ambiguous, it's still less ambiguous than a transcript of extemporaneous debate.