Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-669899f699-g7b4s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-27T17:35:26.187Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2020

Douglas Walton ,
Fabrizio Macagno  and
Giovanni Sartor
Douglas Walton
Affiliation:
University of Windsor, Ontario
Fabrizio Macagno
Affiliation:
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
Giovanni Sartor
Affiliation:
Università di Bologna
Get access

Summary

Statutory interpretation is a problem that is of crucial importance for legal practice and theory, political discussions, ethical issues, and public information. A substantial majority of the US Supreme Court’s case load involves statutory construction, nearly two-thirds of its docket by one recent estimate, and in the years ahead, courts will be asked to construe the meaning of thousands of sections of legislation. However, as Katzmann (2014, 3–10) emphasized, the interpretation of legal texts affects not only daily rulings in the courts at all levels, but even what have become political issues vital to the legal system such as televised confirmation hearings for US Supreme Court nominees. Statutes affect all aspects of our daily lives, including the most pressing public policy issues at a given time. However, although ideally the language of the statute should be clear, the texts passed by legislative bodies, such as the US Congress, can be vague, ambiguous, structurally complex in expression, or even apparently logically inconsistent. Fundamental values of our societies, emerging in the controversies on the issues of freedom of speech, abortion, marriage, or self-defense, are primarily debated as matters of interpretation.

Type
Chapter
Information
Statutory Interpretation
Pragmatics and Argumentation
 , pp. 1 - 16
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Alexy, Robert. 1989. A Theory of Legal Argumentation: The Theory of Rational Discourse as Theory of Legal Justification. Edited by McCormick, Neil and Adler, Ruth. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Aristotle, . 1991. “Topics.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. I, edited by Barnes, Jonathan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Ashley, Kevin. 2017. Artificial Intelligence and Legal Analytics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baum, Lawrence. 2009. Judges and Their Audiences: A Perspective on Judicial Behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Berman, Donald, and Hafner, Carole. 1988. “Obstacles to the development of logic-based models of legal reasoning.” In Computer Power and Legal Language, edited by Walter, Charles, 185–214. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Brian. 2016. “Law and the primacy of pragmatics.” In Pragmatics and Law: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Capone, Alessandro and Poggi, Francesca, 1–13. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.Google Scholar
Capone, Alessandro. 2016. “The role of pragmatics in (re)constructing the rational law-maker.” In Pragmatics & Cognition, edited by Capone, Alessandro and Poggi, Francesca, 21:141–157. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.Google Scholar
Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Charnock, Ross. 2007. “Lexical indeterminacy: Contextualism and rule-following in Common Law adjudication.” In Interpretation, Law and the Construction of Meaning: Collected Papers on Legal Interpretation in Theory, Adjudication and Political Practice, edited by Wagner, Anne, Werner, Wouter, and Cao, Deborah, 21–47. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Springer.Google Scholar
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. 2003. Topica. Edited by Reinhardt, Tobias. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dascal, Marcelo, and Jerzy, Wróblewski. 1988. “Transparency and doubt: Understanding and interpretation in pragmatics and in law.” Law and Philosophy 7(2): 203–224. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00144156.Google Scholar
Easterbrook, Frank. 1990. “What’s so special about judges?” University of Colorado Law Review 61: 773–782.Google Scholar
Easterbrook, Frank. 2017. “The absence of method in statutory interpretation.” University of Chicago Law Review 84(1): 81–97.Google Scholar
Eemeren, Frans van, and Grootendorst, Rob. 1992. Argumentation, Communication, and Fallacies: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Epstein, Lee, Landes, William, and Posner, Richard. 2013. The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Thomas, Prakken, Henry, and Walton, Douglas. 2007. “The Carneades model of argument and burden of proof.” Artificial Intelligence 171(10–15): 875–896. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2007.04.010.Google Scholar
Guastini, Riccardo. 2011. Interpretare e Argomentare. Milano, Italy: Giuffrè.Google Scholar
Hitchcock, David. 2017. On Reasoning and Argument: Essays in Informal Logic and on Critical Thinking. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.Google Scholar
Huang, Yan. 2014. Pragmatics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jaszczolt, Kasia. 2018. “Pragmatics and philosophy: In search of a paradigm.” Intercultural Pragmatics 15(2): 131–159. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2018-0002.Google Scholar
Katzmann, Robert. 2014. Judging Statutes. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kecskes, Istvan. 2013. Intercultural Pragmatics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Deanna, Cheney, Richard, and Weinstock, Michael. 2000. “The development of epistemological understanding.” Cognitive Development 15(3): 309–328. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0885-2014(00)00030-7Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London, UK: Longman.Google Scholar
Llewellyn, Karl. 1949. “Remarks on the theory of appellate decision and the rules or Canons about how statutes are to be construed.” Vanderbilt Law Review 3: 395–406.Google Scholar
Macagno, Fabrizio. 2015. “Presupposition as argumentative reasoning.” In Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society, edited by Capone, Alessandro and Mey, Jacob, 465–487. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.Google Scholar
Macagno, Fabrizio, and Damele, Giovanni. 2013. “The dialogical force of implicit premises. Presumptions in enthymemes.” Informal Logic 33(3): 361. https://doi.org/10.22329/il.v33i3.3679.Google Scholar
Macagno, Fabrizio, and Walton, Douglas. 2015. “Classifying the patterns of natural arguments.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 48(1): 26–53. https://doi.org/10.1353/par.2015.0005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macagno, Fabrizio, and Walton, Douglas. 2017. “Arguments of statutory interpretation and argumentation schemes.” International Journal of Legal Discourse 2(1): 47–83. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijld-2017-0002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macagno, Fabrizio, Walton, Douglas, and Sartor, Giovanni. 2018. “Pragmatic maxims and presumptions in legal interpretation.” Law and Philosophy 37(1): 69–115. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-017-9306-4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacCormick, Neil, and Summers, Robert, eds. 1991. Interpreting Statutes: A Comparative Study. Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth.Google Scholar
Perelman, Chaïm. 1979. Logique Juridique. Nouvelle Réthorique. Paris, France: Dalloz.Google Scholar
Scalia, Antonin, and Garner, Bryan. 2012. Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. Eagan, MN: Thomson West.Google Scholar
Sinclair, Michael. 2005. “Only a sith thinks like that: Llewellyn’s dueling canons, one to seven.” New York Law School Law Review 50: 919–992.Google Scholar
Stalnaker, Robert. 1970. “Pragmatics.” Synthese 22(1–2): 272–289. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00413603.Google Scholar
Tarello, Giovanni. 1980. L’interpretazione della Legge. Milano, Italy: Giuffrè.Google Scholar
Walton, Douglas. 1990. “What is reasoning? What is an argument?” Journal of Philosophy 87: 399–419. https://doi.org/10.2307/2026735.Google Scholar
Walton, Douglas. 2008. “The three bases for the enthymeme: A dialogical theory.” Journal of Applied Logic 6(3): 361–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jal.2007.06.002Google Scholar
Walton, Douglas, and Macagno, Fabrizio. 2015. “A classification system for argumentation schemes.” Argument and Computation 6(3): 219–245. https://doi.org/10.1080/19462166.2015.1123772.Google Scholar
Walton, Douglas, Reed, Christopher, and Macagno, Fabrizio. 2008. Argumentation Schemes. New York; NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Walton, Douglas, Sartor, Giovanni, and Macagno, Fabrizio. 2016. “An argumentation framework for contested cases of statutory interpretation.” Artificial Intelligence and Law 24(1): 51–91. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-016-9179-0.Google Scholar
Walton, Douglas, Sartor, Giovanni, and Macagno, Fabrizio. 2018. “Statutory interpretation as argumentation.” In Handbook of Legal Reasoning and Argumentation, edited by Bongiovanni, Giorgio, Postema, Gerald, Rotolo, Antonino, Valentini, Chiara, Sartor, Giovanni, and Walton, Douglas, 519–560. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×