Brian Flanagan (National University of Ireland, Maynooth) has posted Legal disagreement as disagreement about the collectively intended meaning (Preprint of chapter in Collective Action, Philosophy and Law edited by Teresa Marques, Chiara Valentini (Routledge 2021) 69-88 ) on ResearchGate. Here is the abstract:
Legal positivism, which holds that the morality of the law is contingent on social facts, promises to take seriously our applications of legal concepts. The major challenge for positivists has been to provide an explanation of the phenomenon of legal disagreement. The leading positivist strategy, due to Scott Shapiro, is to appeal to the possible opacity of social plans. On establishing that this strategy is ultimately inadequate, I show that positivists must instead commit to the classical interpretive theory that a text's legal meaning is a function of its historically intended meaning. I then reconsider majoritarian doubts about the existence of collective legislative intentions by sketching two contrasting, non-majoritarian conceptions of collective agency. To match the claims of rival approaches to explain legal phenomena at face value, positivists must adopt some such alternative.
Highly recommended.