The Nature of Legal Interpretation: What Jurists Can Learn about Legal Interpretation from Linguistics and Philosophy

Authors

Triantafyllos Gkouvas

Abstract

Brian G. Slocum’s The Nature of Legal Interpretation: What Jurists Can Learn about Legal Interpretation from Linguistics and Philosophy is a formidable addition to an evolving trend in analytical jurisprudence that invites insights from jurisprudentially “extraneous” domains such as linguistics, philosophy of language and mind, metaethics and philosophy of action. A praiseworthy feature of this trend is the importance it attaches to keeping these insights as free as possible of prior translation in the occasionally cryptic or unnecessarily insular language of analytical jurisprudence and legal doctrine. It is precisely thanks to this feature that recent discussions on the relevance of linguistic (semantic and pragmatic) facts as determinants of legal content display an impressive command of explanatory concepts and methods including the most challenging task of locating different aspects of legal meaning occurring outside as well as across the near side/far side spectrum of pragmatics.1

Recommended Citation

Gkouvas, Triantafyllos (2018) "The Nature of Legal Interpretation: What Jurists Can Learn about Legal Interpretation from Linguistics and Philosophy," International Dialogue: Vol. 8, Article 4.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32873/uno.dc.ID.8.1.1150
Available at: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/id-journal/vol8/iss1/4