Doubting Legal Language: Interpretive Skepticism and Legal Practice

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 a discretional power to choose the legal solution he deems more correct (“normative unbindingness thesis”). The main purpose of this essays consists in investigating the scope of these thesis and their philosophical and rhetoric/strategic relations with a more general semiotic skepticism, according to which the belief that communication requires both mutual understanding and sharing linguistic meanings is unjustified. More precisely, I’ll first explore how interpretive legal skepticism can be grounded on Quine’s and Davidson’s indeterminist conclusions (§3) and on deconstructionism (§4), and then test the possibility of employing against interpretive legal skepticism a criticism of these conceptions, based on Wittgensteinian arguments and developable along various lines by “practice-based” conceptions of meaning (§5).