In Legal Interpretation, Kent Greenawalt focuses on the complex and multi-faceted topic of textual interpretation of the law. All law needs to be interpreted, and there are many ways to do it. But what sorts of questions must one seek to answer in interpreting law and what approach should one take in each case? Whose interpretations should be prioritized? Why would one be drawn to one strategy over another? And should legal interpretation seek to satisfy specific aims or general objectives? In order to provide the answers to these questions, Greenawalt explores the ways in which interpretive strategies from other disciplines--the philosophy of language, literary and musical interpretation, religious interpretation, and general interpretive theory--can augment and enrich methods of legal interpretation. Over the course of the book, he suggests how such forms of interpretation are analogous to legal interpretation--and points to those cases in which interpretation must rest on the distinctive aspects of legal theory, such as is the case with private documents. Furthermore, Greenawalt's meditation suggests that interpretive strategies from other disciplines can shed light on the essential nature of legal interpretation and provide roads by which to account for dissonance between various methods of interpretation. Legal Interpretation is a thought-provoking reflection on the ways that insights from a range of intellectual traditions can deepen our understanding of law, particularly with regard to constitutional law.

In Legal Interpretation, Kent Greenawalt focuses on the complex and multi-faceted topic of textual interpretation of the law. All law needs to be interpreted, and there are many ways to do it. But what sorts of questions must one seek to answer in interpreting law and what approach should one take in each case? Whose interpretations should be prioritized? Why would one be drawn to one strategy over another? And should legal interpretation seek to satisfy specific aims or general objectives? In order to provide the answers to these questions, Greenawalt explores the ways in which interpretive strategies from other disciplines--the philosophy of language, literary and musical interpretation, religious interpretation, and general interpretive theory--can augment and enrich methods of legal interpretation. Over the course of the book, he suggests how such forms of interpretation are analogous to legal interpretation--and points to those cases in which interpretation must rest on the distinctive aspects of legal theory, such as is the case with private documents. Furthermore, Greenawalts meditation suggests that interpretive strategies from other disciplines can shed light on the essential nature of legal interpretation and provide roads by which to account for dissonance between various methods of interpretation. Legal Interpretation is a thought-provoking reflection on the ways that insights from a range of intellectual traditions can deepen our understanding of law, particularly with regard to constitutional law.

For scholars working on almost any aspect of American thought, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia to Philosophers in America presents an indispensable reference work. Selecting over 700 figures from the Dictionary of Early American Philosophers and the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, this condensed edition includes key contributors to philosophical thought. From 1600 to the present day, entries cover psychology, pedagogy, sociology, anthropology, education, theology and political science, before these disciplines came to be considered distinct from philosophy. Clear and accessible, each entry contains a short biography of the writer, an exposition and analysis of his or her doctrines and ideas, a bibliography of writings and suggestions for further reading. Featuring a new preface by the editor and a comprehensive introduction, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia to Philosophers in America includes 30 new entries on twenty-first century thinkers including Martha Nussbaum and Patricia Churchland. With in-depth overviews of Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Noah Porter, Frederick Rauch, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, this is an invaluable one-stop research volume to understanding leading figures in American thought and the development of American intellectual history.

This third volume about legal interpretation focuses on the interpretation of a constitution, most specifically that of the United States of America. In what may be unique, it combines a generalized account of various claims and possibilities with an examination of major domains of American constitutional law. This demonstrates convincingly that the book's major themes not only can be supported by individual examples, but are undeniably in accord with the continuing practice of the United States Supreme Court over time, and cannot be dismissed as misguided. The book's central thesis is that strategies of constitutional interpretation cannot be simple, that judges must take account of multiple factors not systematically reducible to any clear ordering. For any constitution that lasts over centuries and is hard to amend, original understanding cannot be completely determinative. To discern what that is, both how informed readers grasped a provision and what were the enactors' aims matter. Indeed, distinguishing these is usually extremely difficult, and often neither is really discernible. As time passes what modern citizens understand becomes important, diminishing the significance of original understanding. Simple versions of textualist originalism neither reflect what has taken place nor is really supportable. The focus on specific provisions shows, among other things, the obstacles to discerning original understanding, and why the original sense of proper interpretation should itself carry importance. For applying the Bill of Rights to states, conceptions conceived when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted should take priority over those in 1791. But practically, for courts, to interpret provisions differently for the federal and state governments would be highly unwise. The scope of various provisions, such as those regarding free speech and cruel and unusual punishment, have expanded hugely since both 1791 and 1865. And questions such as how much deference judges should accord the political branches depend greatly on what provisions and issues are involved. Even with respect to single provisions, such as the Free Speech Clause, interpretive approaches have sensibly varied, greatly depending on the more particular subjects involved. How much deference judges should accord political actors also depends critically on the kind of issue involved.

Fiduciary law is a critically important body of law. Fiduciary duties ensure the integrity of a remarkable variety of relationships, institutions, and organizations. They apply to relationships of great personal significance, including in some jurisdictions the relationship between parents and children. They structure a wide variety of commercial relationships, and they are essential to the regulation of relationships between professional service providers and their clients, including relationships between lawyer and client, doctor and patient, and investment manager and client. Fiduciary duties, perhaps uniquely in private law, challenge traditional ways of marking the boundaries between private and public law, inasmuch as they figure prominently in public governance. Indeed, there is even a storied tradition of thinking of the authority of the state in fiduciary terms. Notwithstanding its importance, fiduciary law has been woefully under-analysed by legal theorists. Filling this gap with a series of chapters by leading theorists, this book includes chapters on: the nature of fiduciary relationships, the connection between fiduciary duties and morality, the content and significance of fiduciary loyalty, the economic significance of fiduciary law, the application of fiduciary principles to public law and international law, the import of fiduciary relationships to theories of authority, and various other fundamental topics in the field. In many cases, new and important questions are raised by the book's chapters. Indeed, this book not only offers a much-needed theoretical assessment of fiduciary topics, it defines the field going forward, setting an agenda for future philosophical study of fiduciary law.

Legal norms may forbid, require, or authorize a particular form of behavior. The law of contracts, for example, informs people how to enter into agreements that will bind both sides, and from this we establish legal requirements on how they should behave. In public law, legal standards provide authority to legislators and executive officials to set standards for citizens, and also give judges the authority to decide disputes by applying and interpreting governing standards. In Realms of Legal Interpretation, Kent Greenawalt focuses on how courts decide what is legally forbidden or authorized, and how context shapes their decisions. The problem, he argues, is that we do not, and never have, agreed exist on all the details of the standards United States judges should employ--like everyone else, judges have different ideas of what constitutes good common sense. Moreover, circumstance regularly throws up hurdles. For instance, what should a judge do if the text of a statute does not fit the intention of the legislators, or if someone has obviously and mistakenly omitted a necessary item from a will or contract? Different judges react in different ways. Acknowledging that courts will never agree upon a uniform approach to applying norms and interpreting the law, Greenawalt's aim is to provide a capacious, user-friendly model for approaching hard cases sensibly in both public and private law. Just as importantly, the book serves as a pithy guide to the major forms of legal interpretation for nonlawyers. Ultimately, Realms of Legal Interpretation represents a pithy distillation of Greenawalt's many works on the theories that anchor legal interpretation in America's legal system.

International lawyers have long recognised the importance of interpretation to their academic discipline and professional practice. As new insights on interpretation abound in other fields, international law and international lawyers have largely remained wedded to a rule-based approach, focusing almost exclusively on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Such an approach neglects interpretation as a distinct and broader field of theoretical inquiry. Interpretation in International Law brings international legal scholars together to engage in sustained reflection on the theme of interpretation. The book is creatively structured around the metaphor of the game, which captures and illuminates the constituent elements of an act of interpretation. The object of the game of interpretation is to persuade the audience that one's interpretation of the law is correct. The rules of play are known and complied with by the players, even though much is left to their skills and strategies. There is also a meta-discourse about the game of interpretation - 'playing the game of game-playing' - which involves consideration of the nature of the game, its underlying stakes, and who gets to decide by what rules one should play. Through a series of diverse contributions, Interpretation in International Law reveals interpretation as an inescapable feature of all areas of international law. It will be of interest and utility to all international lawyers whose work touches upon theoretical or practical aspects of interpretation.

This book introduces ideas about word meaning in the context of law. It analyzes cases from common law jurisdictions that concern the meaning, definition and legal status of individual words, labels and categories. The focus is on the question of how law assigns authority over word meaning in different circumstances and in different domains of law.

A new perspective on how far law's power derives from socially situated communication rather than from abstract rules.

This innovative book extensively probes and reveals the existence of legal fictions in international law, developing a theory of their effectiveness and legitimacy. Reece Lewis argues that, since legal fictions exist in all systems and types of law, international law is no different and deserves discrete, detailed examination.