Legal Interpretation as Coordination

Abstract

Is legal interpretation fundamentally guided by a law’s text or purpose? This chapter revisits this classic debate with new empirical data from experimental jurisprudence. We present a coordination theory of legal interpretation. We propose legal interpretation is partly an exercise in coordination: judges seek to interpret rules to match interpretations of their peers, other legal officials, and society. Past research indicates that a statute’s plain meaning often constitutes a focal point around which different interpreters can coordinate. One proposed explanation of this effect is that law’s text is more univocal than its purpose. Moral and political disagreement leads to debate about what purpose laws should serve, but, typically, people can more easily reach an accord on the meaning of a law’s plain text. We test this hypothesis and the results do not support it. Our discussion outlines a different possible explanation of coordination around law’s text based on the publicity of text.

Keywords: coordination, expertise, interpretation, purposivism, textualism