Who are the Norm-Addressees in a Legal System? Some Hints Towards a Neglected Conclusion

Abstract

Among the most common grounds underlying the so-called indeterminacy thesis is a two-steps argument: 1) that law is an interpretive practice, and that evidently legal actors more generally hold different (and competing) theories of interpretation, which lead to disagreements as to what the law is; 2) and that, as there is no way to establish the prevalence of one theory over the other, indeterminacy is pervasive in law. In this paper I challenge this argument. In particular I claim that a proper understanding of law as an authoritative communicative enterprise sheds new light on the relation between the functioning of the law and our theories of interpretation, leading to what can be considered a neglected conclusion. After introducing the problem and the perspective adopted, in section two I examine the peculiar relation between sender and receiver of legal norms, conceived of as authoritative speech-acts. This leads to the question of ‘who are the addressees of norm-sentences?’, which I take up in section three. It is argued that there are sound meta-theoretical reasons to consider lay-people as the first and foremost addressees of legal communication. Finally in section four I deal with the consequences of this latter claim for our meta-theory of interpretation, the most important being the need to recognise the prevalence of the linguistic criterion of interpretation amongst the ones available. This is necessary, I argue, for the existence of a legal system as such.

Keywords: Indeterminacy Thesis, Law as Communication, Legal Interpretation, Norm-addressees, Speech-act Theory