  These complications are not special to case law. A number of candidate factors might plausibly determine a statute’s effect on legal rights and obligations. The plain meaning of the text of the statute; the actual (linguistic) intentions of certain members or the assembly as a whole (on some conception of corporate linguistic intention) to say or state something by producing the text; their intentions to change legal rights and obligations in a certain way, i.e., to secure some legal effect by using the specific language of the statute; the effect they would have intended to achieve if they had considered some circumstances they did not; the effect they wanted the statute to be regarded by the courts to have; the effect they expected it to be regarded to have; their second-order intention that a certain first-order intention, e.g., their linguistic intention, control the effect of the statute; the political practices that existed before the relevant statute was enacted and were not thought at the time and ever since to have been affected by its enactment (Scalia 1998); the purposes the statute was formally announced to serve in its preamble or in its sponsors’ reports; the reasons given in its defense during debates; and so on. Often all of these considerations will pull in the same direction, so the choice among them would make no perceptible difference. But they needn’t, and we can always construct hypotheticals to test their relative contribution to the impact that some decision has on the law.