Toward a Cognitive Science of Legal Interpretation

Abstract

This chapter attempts to make sense of the character of legal interpretation and to assess some of the many claims about how legal interpretation does or should proceed. It sketches a cognitively realistic approach to legal interpretation, which seeks to understand such interpretation as a ‘triadic’ process that relates a text to its author or authors, on the one hand, and its interpreter or interpreters, on the other; and which reveals the cognitive tasks that legal interpreters perform in arriving at conclusions about a legal text in the legal context. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 1 identifies some live issues in legal interpretation: the gap between high-level principles and decisions on the ground, and the lack of any clear articulation of how legal interpretation actually works at the level of cognitive process. Section 2 spells out the Relevance Theory framework and its implications for legal interpretation. Section 3 explores the features of legal interpretation by briefly comparing them to those of ‘ordinary’ communication and literary interpretation, and then returns to some of the problems in legal interpretation touched on earlier. Section 4 presents some brief conclusions about the approach to legal interpretation that the chapter has offered.