Abstract
The notion of reasonable interpretation of legal texts, as opposed to the absurd or unacceptable interpretation, is presupposed in different legal theories as the fundamental basis of legal rationality and as a clear limitation to chaotic behaviour by courts. This article argues that the ever-present notion of reasonability is not a useful descriptive tool for understanding legal practices or how legal institutions work. The article builds on radical legal realism perspective in order to develop two arguments supporting this claim. First, it argues that, from an empirical point of view, the complexity of contemporary law and its multiple layers of normativity do not allow for the description of what a reasonable interpretation is, since no coherent universal interpretative community can be envisioned. Second, from a conceptual point of view, it argues that describing the references interpreters make to reasonability as references to a semantic object—that is, to some kind of universal “reasonableness”, a model of reasonable behaviour or rationality—is not a reliable way of understanding judicial practice in a certain legal context. This is the case because, as an internal justification discourse, the appeal to reasonability by the interpreter has no bearing on truth or correctness. Nothing prevents courts from cherry-picking a meaning for reasonability in each case, using it as the justification to solve similar cases in different, sometimes contradictory ways. In short, the concept of reasonability cannot be taken, in itself, as an instrument of legal analysis. As a prescriptive discourse, it can merely be one of the objects legal science intends to observe and explain. Its discursive functions—not its semantic references—, as part of a strategy to convince and to justify, are the only observable elements that can sustain a coherent falsifiable description by legal science.
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Notes
Among the most influential are Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr. [15] and Jerome Frank [14]. For a complete list with analysis of the authors and tendencies, see Brian Leiter [16: 280–288]. More recently, a factually-based empirical approach to judicial decision-making flourished in the political science and psychology departments of American universities in the 70 s and 80 s, and has become a worldwide trend that produces high quality statistical observations on the factors that lead judges to decide one way or another. For a historical consideration and an overview of the most influential of these works, see Kritzer [17].
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Funding
the Ph.D. research performed by the author is being partially funded by the Eiffel Scholarship (Bourse Eiffel, volet doctorat 2018–2019, dossier 919724 J) by Campus France.
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Amorim, L.J.B. Reasonable Interpretation: A Radical Legal Realist Critique. Int J Semiot Law 33, 1043–1057 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09761-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09761-2