A Relativistic Note on Villa’s Pragmatically Oriented Theory of Legal Interpretation

Abstract

Vittorio Villa (2010) argues that the pragmatist view in semantics is the one that is suitable for contemporary theories of legal interpretation that accord a constitutive role to the notion of interpretation. In this critical note I raise two difficulties in Villa’s theory, not from a point of view internal to the debate among legal theories but from the point of view of the philosophy of language. The first difficulty concerns whether illocutionary acts (and propositional attitudes) can be ascribed to legislators. The second difficulty concerns the kind of attitude that relates legislators, who lay down legal dispositions, and jurists, judges and public officers, who create legal norms by interpreting legal dispositions. The difficulties I raise are not meant to be knockdown arguments but evidence that some aspects in Villa’s theory still need to be worked out. Finally, I consider the possibility that another theory in semantics—semantic relativism—is the one that is suitable for contemporary theories of legal interpretation.