[andomar]

"Following the letter of the law" means ignoring Congressional intent. It allows the judge to choose one of the many possible readings of a statute.

So in effect, "following the letter of the law" enlarges a judge's discretion. The opposite of what you would expect.

[jessriedel]

No, not generally. Congress is 545 different people, who definitely don't have a coherent collective intent. The only thing they did collectively was pass the text of the law.

So any coherent notion of "congressional intent" has to mean the intent a person reading the text would infer about a hypothetical coherent author. I don't know anything about this particular case, but it is not at all true in general that there are more ways for a reader to interpret the explicit meaning of the written words than there are ways for a reader to interpret the intent of the written words.

[wslack]

I think the intent is usually found in statements made by drafters of the legislative language. Intent is not packaged in the raw text of statute.

[jessriedel]

You can of course try to infer intent of individual drafters, or by looking at the transcripts of debates on the congressional floor, or by reading emails, or whatever. (I don't think this justified because these discussions aren't voted on, only the text of the law is, but I'm happy to put that aside as not everyone agrees with that perspective.) My point is that this needn't, and indeed generally isn't, a single coherent position, but rather is an incoherent mishmash of many competing interests. It will almost never be less ambiguous than the literal meaning of the words written on the paper, which is the claim I'm responding to. (You can certainly argue that it is better to follow this intent than the literal meaning, but that's different than the claim that the intent is less ambiguous.)

[jessriedel]

And to be clear: intent definitely can be in the raw text. If the whole text of a statute is trying to outlaw a certain kind of activity but one sentence undermines it all under a literal reading (e.g., by excluding all possible people it might apply to), that sentence will be re-interpretted to what it needs to mean for the law to be applied.