Abstract
W. Baude’s and S.E. Sachs’s paper entitled “The Law of Interpretation” is a fascinating survey of a plethora of cases from the American common law system. The main conclusion of the article is extremely interesting from both philosophical and practical points of view. Namely, the authors claim that there exists something additional in the law that has not been identified before, and this is the law of interpretation. This law of interpretation is claimed to be a set of both written and unwritten rules, including the canons of construction. However, a closer look at the examples provided by Baude and Sachs throughout their paper proves some nonhomogenous nature of the unwritten rules of the law of interpretation. I claim that this nonhomogeneity comes precisely from different, more fundamental facts to which these unwritten rules of interpretation are related. Moreover, I argue that the elements of the law of interpretation that are indeed incorporated into the law are in fact scarce, and I investigate the reasons for this state of affairs. Two main reasons are analyzed—the nature of context and the structure of all-things-considered moral arguments.
Keywords
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- 1.
See Greenberg (2017).
- 2.
Baude and Sachs (2017, p. 1116).
- 3.
Hart (2012).
- 4.
Baude and Sachs (2017, p. 1142).
- 5.
Baude and Sachs (2017, p. 1124).
- 6.
The continental tradition relies on the saying that ignorantia iuris nocet, which means literally that ignorance of the law is harmful and, therefore, citizens are required to know the content of the law. Consequently, if the state requires its citizens to know the content of the law, it is the duty of the state to provide its citizens with the possibility of getting acquainted with legal content. This is made through the so-called vacatio legis, a 14 days period between the enactment of a law and it’s entering into force, when the new legal rules are published in publically accessible journals of laws. This way anyone interested can read the new law and if he or she fails to get acquainted with it, she or he is to be blamed. Since unwritten rules of interpretation are never published in this way, they must be somehow different from the iuris mentioned in the Latin saying, as interpretive rules are not that easily accessible to laymen.
- 7.
Shapiro (1998).
- 8.
Raz (2009).
- 9.
J. Raz distinguishes between ‘reasoning about the law’ and ‘reasoning in accordance with the law’ and it is the latter that is performer by judges and contains moral elements. Raz (2009, p. 183).
- 10.
Bulygin (2015).
- 11.
Marmor (2014).
- 12.
Greenberg (2017, p. 124).
- 13.
Recanati (2010).
- 14.
Borg (2006).
- 15.
Recanati (2002).
- 16.
Asgeirsson (2016).
- 17.
Matczak (2018).
- 18.
Greenberg (2017, p. 105).
- 19.
Baude and Sachs (2017, p. 1128).
- 20.
Baude and Sachs (2017, p. 1128).
- 21.
Baude and Sachs (2017, p. 1092).
- 22.
- 23.
Recanati (2010).
- 24.
Baude and Sachs (2017, p. 1107).
- 25.
Goldsworthy (1994, p. 154).
- 26.
Searle (1978, p. 127).
- 27.
Goldsworthy (1994, p. 158).
- 28.
Goldsworthy (1994, p. 161).
- 29.
Searle (1978).
- 30.
Goldsworthy (1994, p. 158).
- 31.
Skoczeń (2019).
- 32.
Sbisà (2017).
- 33.
Skoczeń (2019).
- 34.
Grice (1975, p. 44).
- 35.
Grice (1975, p. 46).
- 36.
Grice (1975, p. 47).
- 37.
- 38.
Horn (1984, p. 13).
- 39.
Baude and Sachs (2017, p. 1144).
- 40.
Marmor (2016).
- 41.
Burazin and Ratti (2019).
- 42.
Baude and Sachs (2017, p. 1105).
- 43.
Baude and Sachs (2017, pp. 1108–1109).
- 44.
Levenbook (1984).
- 45.
Baude and Sachs (2017, p. 1111).
- 46.
Baude and Sachs (2017, p. 1111).
- 47.
Raz (2009).
- 48.
Rodríguez-Blanco (2017).
- 49.
Moore (2004).
- 50.
I thank Kenneth Ehrenberg for a helpful discussion of this issue.
- 51.
Baude and Sachs (2017, p. 1144).
- 52.
Baude and Sachs (2017, pp. 1138–1139).
- 53.
Waismann (1947).
- 54.
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Acknowledgment
This research was funded by grant no 2018/30/M/HS5/00254 (Harmonia, Polish National Centre for Science).
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Skoczeń, I. (2019). Constraining Adjudication: An Inquiry into the Nature of W. Baude’s and S. Sachs’ Law of Interpretation. In: Duarte, D., Moniz Lopes, P., Silva Sampaio, J. (eds) Legal Interpretation and Scientific Knowledge. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18671-5_6
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