Journal of Legal Research

Journal of Legal Research

The Semantics of the Discourse of "Public Will" in Legal Literature and Legislation

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
1 Professor, Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Faculty of Law, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.
2 PhD student in Criminal Law and Criminology, Faculty of Law, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
This research focuses on the semantics of the term "public will" and seeks to answer the question of what meanings or significations the public will conveys in legal literature and legislation. The findings of this study lead to the discovery and establishment of three definitions and theoretical frameworks of public will, each of which can be situated within a specific body of knowledge. The definitions are as follows: public will as a mechanism for the manifestation of the will of a social system; public will in public policy-making and planning (objective and subjective approaches); and public will in political philosophy (the general will arising from the social contract theory).Subsequently, an effort has been made to concentrate on the main trajectory of the research, namely the conceptualization of public will in legal literature and legislation, by integrating the dimensions of all the aforementioned definitions. The outcome of the research indicates that in legislative literature, by combining the dimensions of all three definitional frameworks of public will, three major interpretations can be presented, under which all the more specific and subsidiary definitions provided by various scholars can be categorized;
Keywords


Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 13 December 2025