| Interpretation

This course builds on earlier courses in the LL.B.(Hons.) programme, namely Legal Method and Jurisprudence. It focuses on the problem of interpretation in the law, which is a central aspect of the work of lawyers. However, interpretation is not a task that concerns only lawyers or legal theorists. We interpret each day, as we converse, listen to music, read novels or poems or watch movies. Similarly, the sacred books of the world have, much like legislations, also been the subject of many interpretative controversies. Yet, by what standard do we interpret? While interpreting, is it important to stay true to the intention of the author? How do we even discern this? How do we claim that our interpretation is true? Or can there be multiple true interpretations?

One of the central tasks of lawyers and judges is to read and interpret legislative texts. In the classic formulation, judges don’t make law, but simply interpret it to give effect to the meaning embodied in the text. However, beyond the easy cases where legal text applies to facts in a straightforward manner, are vast domains of uncertainty arising from ambiguity or indeterminacy of the text (and indeed, the limits of language itself), which are not susceptible to easy resolution. The conventional wisdom that judges engage in a value-neutral, objective analysis, seems to narrate an incomplete story. Judges are human, they live in and surrounded by society, and in courts and elsewhere are subject to social, political and moral arguments and positions which may conflict. While there is a broadly accepted technical grammar of legal interpretation that operate as constraints on how judges may interpret text, scholars are divided over the question of what a coherent and principled account of interpretation looks like, and how exactly these constraints apply to judges.

As with the appreciation of literature, art or music, it is argued that legal interpretation has a subjective and objective component – while there is an object that is interpreted (the legislative text), the interpretation requires us to travel beyond the object, and consider conventional views of the interpretive community. This tension between objectivity and subjectivity and between consistency, clarity and coherence on one hand, and dynamism and evolution on the other, is at the heart of the task of legal interpretation. Thus, this enterprise is fertile ground for philosophical study and also important as a practical matter to brief and argue cases. It is also, as a central element of the judicial role, key to understanding the functioning of the legal system, especially the courts, as institutions in a constitutional polity.