Full Description
This book discusses the question of whether legal interpretation is a scientific activity. The law's dependency on language, at least for the usual communication purposes, not only makes legal interpretation the main task performed by those whose work involves the law, but also an unavoidable step in the process of resolving a legal case. This task of decoding the words and sentences used by normative authorities while enacting norms, carried out in compliance with the principles and rules of the natural language adopted, is prone to all of the difficulties stemming from the uncertainty intrinsic to all linguistic conventions. In this context, seeking to determine whether legal interpretation can be scientific or, in other words, can comply with the requirements for scientific knowledge, becomes a central question. In fact, the coherent application of the law depends on a knowledge regarding the meaning of normative sentences that can be classified(at least) as being structured, systematically organized and tendentially objective. Accordingly, this book focuses on analyzing precisely these problems; its respective contributions offer a range of revealing perspectives on both the problems and their ramifications.
Contents
The Limited Function of Hermeneutics in Law.- An Analytical Foundation of Rule Scepticism.- The Politics of Legal Interpretation.- Naturalizing Interpretation: A First Approach on "Hardware" and "Software" Determinants of Legal Interpretation.- An Almost Pure Theory of Legal Interpretation within Legal Science.- Constraining Adjudication: An Inquiry into the Nature of W. Baude's and S. Sachs' Law of Interpretation.- When It Is Vague What Is Vague: Identifying Vagueness.- Institutional Turn(s) in Theories of Legal Interpretation.- Legal Science: The Demarcation Problem and the Perimeter of "Good Science".
