It has been said that humans cannot escape interpretation. Law involves a vast amount of human interpretation, but there remain many disagreements over how legal interpretation happens and what drives it. Judges, lawyers, juries, and parties must interpret a great deal of factual, and in the case of judges and lawyers, legal information. Yet, legal theorists have vastly different understandings of what drives, or what should drive, the process of legal interpretation. Many scholars and jurists agree with the notion that law is, in a real sense, interpretation. In The Nature of the Judicial Process, Justice Cardozo wrote:
“There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals. All their lives, forces which they do not recognize and cannot name, have been tugging at them — inherited instincts, traditional beliefs, acquired convictions; and the resultant is an outlook on life, a conception of social needs. . .which, when reasons are nicely balanced, must determine where choice shall fall.
In this mental background every problem finds its setting. We may try to see things as objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any eyes except our own. To that test they are all brought — a form of pleading or an act of parliament, the wrongs of paupers or the rights of princes, a village ordinance or a nation's charter.”
This panel will explore the reality (hypothesis?) that Law IS Interpretation from several perspectives.
Business Meeting at Program Conclusion.