Izabela Skoczeń – författare

What does it mean to understand the law? This challenging book discusses whether and how understanding the law is qualitatively different from understanding a different, non-legal text or linguistic utterance, and whether knowledge of a language is sufficient to understand legal content in that language.Providing a comprehensive overview of current studies of interpretivism, both in the common and civil law systems, this book applies state of the art theories and tools of modern philosophy of language to shed new light on traditional questions in legal theory. Chapters discuss the normative importance and descriptive impact of moral inferences in legal interpretation and critically analyse the claims of legal interpretivism, uncovering the most recent versions of legal positivism. The impressive selection of leading contributors explore an array of important topics including metaethics, expressivism and legal semantics.Outlining a new direction of study and delineating the path for future research on moral inferences in legal interpretation, this timely book will be a thought-provoking read for legal scholars and students interested in legal theory, philosophy and interpretation.

What does it mean to understand the law? This challenging book discusses whether and how understanding the law is qualitatively different from understanding a different, non-legal text or linguistic utterance, and whether knowledge of a language is sufficient to understand legal content in that language.

Providing a comprehensive overview of current studies of interpretivism, both in the common and civil law systems, this book applies state of the art theories and tools of modern philosophy of language to shed new light on traditional questions in legal theory. Chapters discuss the normative importance and descriptive impact of moral inferences in legal interpretation and critically analyse the claims of legal interpretivism, uncovering the most recent versions of legal positivism. The impressive selection of leading contributors explore an array of important topics including metaethics, expressivism and legal semantics.

Outlining a new direction of study and delineating the path for future research on moral inferences in legal interpretation, this timely book will be a thought-provoking read for legal scholars and students interested in legal theory, philosophy and interpretation.

This book proposes a novel, descriptive theory that unveils the linguistic mechanisms lurking behind judicial decisions. It offers a comprehensive account of the ongoing debate, as well as a novel solution to the problem of understanding legal pragmatics.Linguistic pragmatics is based on a theory created by Paul Grice, who observed that people usually convey more than just the amalgam of the meaning of the words they use. He labeled this surplus of meaning a “conversational implicature.” This book addresses the question of whether implicatures occur in the legal language, firstly illustrating why the classic Gricean theory is not applicable (without substantial modification) to the description of legal language and proposing a novel approach based on a modification of Andrei Marmor’s “strategic speech.” Subsequently, it analyzes neo-Gricean theories and their limited use for describing the mechanisms of legal interpretation, and discusses the possibility of pragmatic enrichment of legal content as well as the notion of completeness of a legal proposition. Lastly, it illustrates how the developed theory works in practice, with examples from penal and civil law cases. The book is helpful to legal practitioners, since it provides insights into the reasons for and linguistic mechanisms behind courts’ decisions, but also to philosophers of law, philosophers of language, linguists and non-experts wishing to better understand the mechanisms of legal decision making.

This book proposes a novel, descriptive theory that unveils the linguistic mechanisms lurking behind judicial decisions. It offers a comprehensive account of the ongoing debate, as well as a novel solution to the problem of understanding legal pragmatics.

Linguistic pragmatics is based on a theory created by Paul Grice, who observed that people usually convey more than just the amalgam of the meaning of the words they use. He labeled this surplus of meaning a “conversational implicature.” This book addresses the question of whether implicatures occur in the legal language, firstly illustrating why the classic Gricean theory is not applicable (without substantial modification) to the description of legal language and proposing a novel approach based on a modification of Andrei Marmor’s “strategic speech.” Subsequently, it analyzes neo-Gricean theories and their limited use for describing the mechanisms of legal interpretation, and discusses the possibility of pragmatic enrichment of legal content as well as the notion of completeness of a legal proposition. Lastly, it illustrates how the developed theory works in practice, with examples from penal and civil law cases. The book is helpful to legal practitioners, since it provides insights into the reasons for and linguistic mechanisms behind courts’ decisions, but also to philosophers of law, philosophers of language, linguists and non-experts wishing to better understand the mechanisms of legal decision making.