1. The sense in which the law understands something (the intendment of a contract is that the contract is legally enforceable).
— Also termed intendment of law.
2. A decision-maker’s inference about the true meaning or intention of a legal instrument (there is no need for intendment, the court reasoned, when the text of the statute is clear). — Formerly also spelled entendment.
common intendment. The natural or common meaning in legal interpretation.
3. A person’s expectations when interacting with others within the legal sphere.“Our institutions and our formalized interactions with one another are accompanied by certain interlocking expectations that may be called intendments, even though there is seldom occasion to bring these underlying expectations across the threshold of consciousness. In a very real sense when I cast my vote in an election my conduct is directed and conditioned by an anticipation that my ballot will be counted in favor of the candidate I actually vote for. This is true even though the possibility that my ballot will be thrown in the wastebasket, or counted for the wrong man, may never enter my mind as an object of conscious attention. In this sense the institution of elections may be said to contain an intendment that the votes cast will be faithfully tallied, though I might hesitate to say, except in a mood of rhetoric, that the election authorities had entered a contract with me to count my vote as I had cast it.” Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law 217 (rev. ed. 1969).
