Legal Definitions - authentic interpretation

Definition: Authentic interpretation is the process of determining the intended meaning of a law or legal document by asking the drafter or drafting body what they meant.

Example: If a law is unclear or ambiguous, a court may ask the person or group who wrote the law what they meant by it. This is called authentic interpretation. For example, if a law says "no vehicles allowed in the park," but it's unclear whether bicycles count as vehicles, a court may ask the lawmakers who wrote the law if they intended for bicycles to be included or not.

Authentic interpretation is one of several methods of statutory construction, which is the process of interpreting and applying laws. Other methods include grammatical interpretation (interpreting based solely on the words themselves), liberal interpretation (interpreting according to what the reader believes the author reasonably intended), and strict interpretation (interpreting according to what the reader believes the author must have been thinking at the time of writing).