Yesterday I laid out two stylized views on interpretation — one that treats it as a simply matter of language (read the statute!), and one that treats it as a matter of judicial policymaking. And I hinted that there might be a third way. Since we give it away in the title of our paper, you probably already guessed what it is — law.

Simply put, we think that there can be, and usually are, legal rules of interpretation that pick among contested theories of meaning and fill gaps where language seems to run out. These are legal rules, not derivable from language alone. But as law, these aren’t unfettered normative reasoning either.

Our proposal has been criticized as “artificial.” We plead guilty to that charge, but only in the archaic sense (think “artificer”) of “well-crafted.” The “artificial reason” of the law, as Sir Edward Cokefamously put it, offers artificial solutions to many questions in life. That’s as true in interpretation as it is elsewhere.

Read more at The Washington Post