Legislative Debates in Parliament as a Source of Statutory Justification: A Framework for Analysis and Evaluation

According to the ideology underlying our legal systems, parliamentary debates are supposed to be a crucial element of the public justification and hence of the legitimacy of legislation. Yet, the question of how to analyse their (potential and actual) justificatory value has largely been neglected up to date in mainstream legisprudential scholarship, and still remains undertheorised. The present chapter introduces the general hypothesis that legislative debates in parliament are a privileged—albeit ‘condensed’—source of legislative justification and outlines a legisprudential method to reconstruct and analyse them, with the aim of exploring the plausibility of this hypothesis. Furthermore, the paper suggests some evaluative criteria or guidelines that may help to establish whether a bill (or an individual legislative measure) has been reasonably justified by those who pass it, i.e. by the elected lawmakers. These criteria attempt to account for the ‘extent’ (the ‘scope’ and ‘depth’), the ‘structural correctness’, the ‘dialectical-deliberative adequacy’ (or ‘thoroughness’) and the ‘plausibility’ of the legislative justification that MPs offer during parliamentary debates on bills.