Flanagan, Brian (2010) Revisiting the Contribution of Literal Meaning to Legal Meaning. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 30 (2). pp. 255-271. ISSN 0143-6503

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Abstract

Many theorists take the view that literal meaning can be one of a number of factors to be weighed in reaching a legal interpretation. Still others regard literal meaning as having the potential to legally justify a particular outcome. Building on the scholarly response to HLA Hart’s famous ‘vehicles in the park’ hypothetical, this article presents a formal argument that literal meaning cannot be decisive of what’s legally correct, one which, unusually, makes no appeal to controversial theories within philosophy of language or literary criticism. If the argument is sound, it follows that an enactment’s literal meaning neither weighs in the determination of correct legal outcomes nor permits the application of a sequencing model, ie a non-monotonic logic, to its interpretation. These implications are considerably more controversial within contemporary legal theory than the idea that a statute’s literal meaning is not necessarily its legal meaning. Yet we see that, given an intuitive notion of legal truth, they follow from it nonetheless.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Literal Meaning; Legal Meaning;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Law
Item ID:	2921
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqp030
Depositing User:	Brian Flanagan
Date Deposited:	11 Jan 2012 09:26
Journal or Publication Title:	Oxford Journal of Legal Studies
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Refereed:	Yes
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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