The Pragmatics of Adjudication. In the Footsteps of Alf Ross

Three insights about a pragmatic theory of legal interpretation are enumerated here: on legal sources, judicial precedents, and statutory interpretation, respectively. Firstly, with regards legal sources, a theory of them in terms of legal materials is restated on the basis of Ross 1952, with a slight caveat: legislation seems even more indeterminate than precedents, a mere starting point for such judicial inferential processes as qualification of facts-of-the-case, interpretation, and application. Secondly, common law’s precedents and civil law’s jurisprudence (in French), are different sorts of customary law which are likely to replace statutory law (in common law) or complement it (in civil law) in order to make judicial decisions less unpredictable. Finally, as far as the statutory interpretation is concerned, interpretive skepticism is restated by assuming that it is a trivial starting point for a truly realistic, pragmatic-contextualist and inferentialist theory of such an interpretation. This theory needs to conceive interpretation as the recontextualization of decontextualized statutes, where the ultimate context is provided by precedents or jurisprudence itself.