Doubting legal language: Interpretive skepticism and legal practice

Abstract

The present paper revisits and critically reconstructs one central tenet of interpretive legal skepticism, which I will label the “equivocity thesis”. According to this thesis, each statutory provision and judicial opinion can be constructed or interpreted in many ways, due to the plurality of the admissible hermeneutic techniques, methods, doctrines, and normative theories (“plurality thesis”) and their equal legal value (“parity thesis”): this leaves the interpreter with the discretional power to choose the legal solution he deems more correct (“normative unbindingness thesis”). The main purpose of this essay is an investigation of the scope of these theses and their philosophical and rhetorical/strategic relations with a more general semiotic skepticism, according to which the belief that communication requires both mutual understanding and shared linguistic meanings is unjustified. More precisely, I will first explore how interpretive legal skepticism can be grounded on Quine’s and Davidson’s indeterminist arguments (Sect. 3) and on deconstructionism (Sect. 4), and then test the possibility of employing a criticism of these conceptions against interpretive legal skepticism, based on Wittgensteinian arguments and developed along various lines by “practice-based” conceptions of meaning (Sect. 5).