Description
Book SynopsisWhat does it mean to understand the law? This challenging book discusses whether and how understanding the law is qualitatively different from understanding a different, non-legal text or linguistic utterance, and whether knowledge of a language is sufficient to understand legal content in that language.
Providing a comprehensive overview of current studies of interpretivism, both in the common and civil law systems, this book applies state of the art theories and tools of modern philosophy of language to shed new light on traditional questions in legal theory. Chapters discuss the normative importance and descriptive impact of moral inferences in legal interpretation and critically analyse the claims of legal interpretivism, uncovering the most recent versions of legal positivism. The impressive selection of leading contributors explore an array of important topics including metaethics, expressivism and legal semantics.
Outlining a new direction of study and delineating the path for future research on moral inferences in legal interpretation, this timely book will be a thought-provoking read for legal scholars and students interested in legal theory, philosophy and interpretation.
Trade Review‘This volume makes important contributions to the literature on legal interpretation and is essential reading for any jurisprudential scholar or legal practitioner concerned to understand how the content of the law depends on the communicative content that lawgivers intend to transmit. A very worthwhile read.’ -- Alexander Sarch, University of Surrey School of Law, UK
‘Interpretivism and the Limits of Law
offers a thorough, searching assessment of major theories of the determinants of law’s content by an impressive range of distinguished legal scholars from around the world. It is an essential intervention into a debate that has engaged legal theorists for decades, adding hosts of new insights and refining the debate in critical ways. It establishes a new point of departure for future theoretical work in this area.’ -- Gerald Postema, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US
Table of ContentsContents: 1 Introduction to Interpretivism and the Limits of Law 1 Izabela Skoczeń PART I LEGAL REASONING THROUGH THE LENS OF INTERPRETIVISM 2 Practical reasoning and the communicative model of law 12 Brian H Bix 3 Legal antipositivism and the reliability challenge in metaethics 23 David Plunkett 4 The meaning and interpretation of statutes in Anglo-American legal systems 43 Jeffrey Goldsworthy 5 The communication theory as a phantom 60 Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki and Francesca Poggi PART II INTERPRETIVISM VERSUS THE COMMUNICATIVE MODEL OF LEGAL REASONING 6 Why the anti-positivists’ concept of practice is too thin 77 Marcin Matczak 7 Legal interpretivism: all or some? 96 Adam Dyrda 8 Interpretation and the bounds of reason 113 Giovanni Tuzet PART III LEGAL INTERPRETATION AND LEGAL MEANING 9 The authoritative intention thesis 130 Torben Spaak 10 Distinguishing the distinguishable: interpretative norms and interpretative criteria in adjudication of meaning 146 David Duarte and Pedro Moniz Lopes 11 From rule-scepticism to the interpretive orthodoxy? On Wittgenstein, legal theory, and the difference between understanding and interpreting a rule 159 Paolo Sandro PART IV THE SEMANTICS AND META-SEMANTICS OF LEGAL CONTENT 12 Semantic theories and interpretation: a critique of Michael S Green’s ‘Dworkin’s Fallacy’ 176 Thomas Bustamante and Thiago Lopes Decat 13 When expressiveness flows back: the symbolic functions of legislation and their legal significance 194 Francesco Ferraro 14 Expressivism and the ex aequo et bono adjudication method 212 Izabela Skoczeń and Krzysztof Posłajko 15 Semantics of institutional names 229 Paweł Banaś Index 246
