刑法解释的立场是客观解释——基于会话含义理论的分析

司法者理解和解释法律的活动是其和法律文本进行对话的过程,语用学中的会话含义理论可以作为研究法律解释问题的分析工具。根据会话含义理论,立法者预料到并期待解释者会根据文本的语义结构、读者的心理图式、生活中的常规关系等解读出刑法文本的语用意义,司法者必然会根据语境因素对刑法文本的意义进行语用推理,解读出字面意义之外的隐含意义、形式意义之外的实质意义、语义意义之外的语用意义,并且在不同语境下解读出不同意义。刑法文本为语用推理划定了大致范围,语用推理实现了文本静态意义向动态意义的转化,因此刑法解释立场是并应该是客观解释。     

THE SEMANTICS OF SYMBOLIC SPEECH

More than half a century ago, the Supreme Court held that the free speech protection of the First Amendment is not limited to verbal communication, but also applies to such expressive conduct as saluting a flag or burning a flag. Even though the Supreme Court has decided a number of important cases involving expressive conduct, the Court has never announced any standards for distinguishing such conduct from conduct without communicative value. The aim of this paper is to examine which conceptions of nonverbal expression underlie judicial decisions on expressive conduct, and to offer an account of expressive conduct grounded in contemporary semantic theory. The central hypothesis of this paper is that significance of expressive conduct can be explained by principles that explain important features of linguistic meaning. I propose an analysis of expressive conduct that takes the meaningfulness of conduct as a function of the action and its consequences in context. I develop a theory of expressive conduct whose underlying conception of expression is based on a number of ideas from speech act theory. These are Grice's account of nonnatural meaning, Austin's theory of illocutionary force, and Grice's work on conversational implicature. My analysis understands the meaningfulness of conduct in terms of its relational properties and relevant features of the context upon which illocutionary force, perlocutionary properties and implicature are predicated. The natural and conventional properties of types of conduct, features of the context, and underlying social and cultural presumptions and expectations about human conduct thus play a role in the constitution of symbolic speech.     

Detachment and Deontic Language in Law

Some legal philosophers regard the use of deontic language to describe the law as philosophically significant. Joseph Raz argues that it gives rise to ‘the problem of normativity of law’. He develops an account of what he calls ‘detached’ legal statements to resolve the problem. Unfortunately, Raz’s account is difficult to reconcile with the orthodox semantics of deontic language. The article offers a revised account of the distinction between committed and detached legal statements. It argues that deontic statements carry a Gricean generalized conversational implicature to the effect that the rules in question reflect the speaker’s own commitments. Detached legal statements are made when this implicature is either explicitly cancelled or when the conversational context is sufficient to defeat the implicature. I conclude by offering some tentative reflections on the theoretical significance of deontic language in the law.     

Legal Speech and Implicit Content in the Law

Interpreting the content of the law is not limited to what a relevant lawmaker utters. This paper examines the extent to which implied and implicit content is part of the law, and specifically whether the Gricean concept of conversational implicature is relevant in determining the content of law. Recent work has focused on how this question relates to acts of legislation. This paper extends the analysis to case law and departs from the literature on several key issues. The paper's argument is based upon two points: (1) Precedent‐setting judicial opinions may consist of multiple conversations, of which some entail opposing implicata, and (2) if a particular precedent‐setting judicial opinion consists of multiple conversations, of which some entail opposing implicata, then no meaningful conversational implicatum is part of the content of that particular precedent‐setting opinion. Nevertheless, the paper's conclusion leaves open the prospect of gleaning something in between conversational implicature and what is literally said, namely, conversational impliciture.     

Hefa Quanyi: More than a Problem of Translation. Linguistic Evidence of Lawfully Limited Rights in China

This essay addresses the legal meanings of the phrase hefa quanyi (lawful or legitimate rights and interests), an important Chinese legal phrase that is frequently found in many Chinese laws and legal documents, and whose interpretation is claimed by various scholars to affect the alienability of people’s rights. It first challenges the existing translations of the phrase into Italian and English. It secondly delves into its history and etymology, studying the legal meanings that the phrase has had in the various texts of the Constitution of China. It is suggested that hefa quanyi is not the semantic and legal equivalent of Western ‘rights and interests’, but rather that the phrase retains its etymological meaning of ‘power and negatively-connoted profit’. It is further argued that the adjective hefa (lawful) in the phrase is used to impose constraints on the rights and interests that the Chinese people are entitled to.

     

Minimal Semantics and Legal Interpretation

In this paper I will tackle three issues. First, I aim to briefly outline the backbone of semantic minimalism, while focusing on the idea of ‘liberal truth conditions’ developed by Emma Borg in her book ‘Minimal Semantics’. Secondly, I will provide an account of the three principal views in legal interpretation: intentionalism, textualism and purposivism. All of them are based on a common denominator labelled by lawyers ‘literal meaning’. In the paper I suggest a novel way of viewing this common denominator as almost identical to the Borgian ‘liberal truth conditions’, at least at a conceptual level. In the third section I will focus on the conceptual similarities between the two ideas. I intend to depict that, although legal theorists do not admit it explicitly, they treat literal legal meaning as minimal propositional content that can be ascribed liberal truth conditions. There are two main objections to liberal truth conditions: their under-determinacy and unintuitive character. Both objections can be applied to ‘literal meaning’. However, the idea of liberal truth conditions gives an adequate account of what lawyers call literal meaning and is helpful in explaining the mechanism of understanding of provisions and reasons leading to the necessity of statutory interpretation.     

Why the Debate Between Originalists and Evolutionists Rests on a Semantic Mistake

I argue that the dispute between two leading theories of interpretation of legal texts, textual originalism and textual evolutionism, depends on the false presupposition that changes in the way a word is used necessarily require a change in the word’s meaning. Semantic externalism goes a long way towards reconciling these views by showing how a word’s semantic properties can be stable over time, even through vicissitudes of usage. I argue that temporal externalism can account for even more semantic stability, however. Temporal externalism is the theory that the content of an utterance at time t may be determined by developments in linguistic usage subsequent to t. If this semantic theory is correct, then the originalist and evolutionist positions effectively collapse. Originalism is correct in that the original meaning of the text is the meaning that is binding on jurists, but evolutionism is vindicated, as it is the current practices and standards that determine the meaning the text now has, and has always had. Objections to temporal externalism, and to its application to the interpretation of legal texts, are considered and addressed.     

话语中的省略推理

本文主要探讨省略三段论的内容结构，提出常规关系在扩展和推导会话语义方面的作用；进一步提出省略三段论的驱动机制，影响省略推理的有关变量；并从包含、概括、综合、联想、删除等方面阐述恢复三段论的规则。     

The Purposes of Legal Punishment

There is a vast literature on the meanings of legal penalties. However, we lack a theory that explains them according to the formation of the modern state. Oakeshott's theory can help explain this phenomenon, leading to an attempt of the individual to take over as many powers of the state as possible. Thus, Kant's and Smith's retributivism is the most consistent of all those theories. Nevertheless, the preventive and resocializing theory of Bentham succeeded eventually. But is this a liberal theory? We contrast the explanations of H.L.A. Hart and Frederick Rosen in order to lay the groundwork for a liberal theory of the meaning of legal sanctions.     

作为专家证人的语言学家在立法和司法活动中的价值

法学与语言学的日趋融合，法律语言学成为人们研究的热点，语言学家的价值也日益凸现在立法和司法活动中。从立法层面观之，法律语言学家的介入将使法律文本更能体现其应有的文体特征，有助于改变世界各国普遍存在的立法失范化状况；从司法实践层面而言，语言学家的介入，将有助于解决因法规、合同等法律文本的不同诠释而产生的争议，使司法活动更合乎正义性要求。建议我国法学界给予语言学家施展其专业才能的空间，以此肯定语言学家的地位和价值，这将有助于完善我国现有的专家证人制度，从而实现法学界和语言学界的“双赢”。     

论民事法律事实的类型区分

依据民法学问题的讨论是否与民法规则的设计或适用直接相关,民法学问题可被区分为民法问题和纯粹民法学问题。民法学界关注和讨论的不少问题,属于与民法规则的设计或适用不直接相关的纯粹民法学问题,其主要包括事实判断问题、价值判断问题和解释选择问题。民事法律事实的类型区分属于纯粹民法学问题中的解释选择问题,我国民法学界就此存在详细区分说、简略区分说与折中说的对立。在三种学说都符合逻辑自洽且富有学说解释力标准的前提下,简略区分说更能满足民法学界对民事法律事实进行类型区分的各种主要学术目的,因而是更为可取的学说。     

Improving legal quality—a knowledge engineering approach

Many legislation drafting departments at the different ministries have their own quality insurance techniques. Furthermore in many cases the Ministry of Justice has a special role because it is usually responsible for the overall legal quality of a country. Despite all the effort that has been spent on improving legal quality using traditional measurements, such as co‐reading (peer reviewing etc.) many anomalies can still be found in recently drafted legislation. The situation is even worse in situations when existing legislation is adapted. This paper will show how a systematic approach that has its origins in knowledge engineering can help to improve legal quality. This approach was developed in the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA) (in Dutch: Belastingdienst) and offers both a method and supporting tools that support a systematic translation of (new) legislation into the administrations' processes. This method—called the POWER‐method—not only helps to improve the quality of (new) legislation. It also supports codification of the legal knowledge into procedures, computer programs and other designs. One of the advantages thereof is the reduction of the time‐to‐market of the implementation of legislation and its increased transparency (which will lead to reduced maintenance costs). Focus will be placed on legal quality improvement and knowledge representation techniques that are used to enable this will be explained. In contrast to other knowledge modeling approaches, the POWER‐approach is focused on modeling legal sources rather than expert knowledge. Expert knowledge of course is indispensable to find the correct interpretations and also for efficiency reasons. Starting with representing the (legal) experts' knowledge (using scenarios) helps to find the adequate scope (the legal sources to be analyzed). Confronting the expert with differences between the models built out of the experts' knowledge and the conceptual models constructed of the other knowledge sources (specifically the law) causes the legal experts to see things in a different light and has often led to changes in the law.     

An end to shadow banning? Transparency rights in the Digital Services Act between content moderation and curation

This paper offers a legal perspective on the phenomenon of shadow banning: content moderation sanctions which are undetectable to those affected. Drawing on recent social science research, it connects current concerns about shadow banning to novel visibility management techniques in content moderation, such as delisting and demotion. Conventional moderation techniques such as outright content removal or account suspension can be observed by those affected, but these new visibility often cannot. This lends newfound significance to the legal question of moderation transparency rights. The EU Digital Services Act (DSA) is analysed in this light, as the first major legislation to regulate transparency of visibility remedies. In effect, its due process framework prohibits shadow banning with only limited exceptions. In doing so, the DSA surfaces tensions between two competing models for content moderation: as rule-bound administration or as adversarial security conflict. I discuss possible interpretations and trade-offs for this regime, and then turn to a more fundamental problem: how to define visibility reduction as a category of content moderation actions. The concept of visibility reduction or ‘demotions’ is central to both the shadow banning imaginary and to the DSA's safeguards, but its meaning is far from straightforward. Responding to claims that demotion is entirely relative, and therefore not actionable as a category of content moderation sanctions, I show how visibility reduction can still be regulated when defined as ex post adjustments to engagement-based relevance scores. Still, regulating demotion in this way will not cover all exercises of ranking power, since it manifests not only in individual cases of moderation but also through structural acts of content curation; not just by reducing visibility, but by producing visibility.     

Some Problems with Robert Alexy's Account of Legal Validity: The Relevance of the Participant's Perspective*

This article examines Robert Alexy's account of legal validity. It concludes that Alexy's account of legal validity lacks sufficient support given the author's methodological commitments. To reach that conclusion, it assesses the plausibility of simultaneously maintaining that the participant's perspective has conceptual privilege in the explanation of the nature of law, that legal discourse is a special case of general practical discourse, and that unjust considerations can be legally valid norms.     

Law and Conversational Implicatures

This essay investigates the applicability of Grice’s theory of conversational implicatures to legal interpretation, in order to highlight some of its characteristics. After introducing the notions of language and discourse, and briefly explaining the most salient aspects of Grice’s theory, I will analyse the interpretation of two types of legal acts; authoritative legal acts and acts of private autonomy. Regarding the first class, exemplified by statutes, I will argue against the applicability of Gricean theory due to the conflictual behaviour of the addressees and, above all, to the insurmountable indeterminacy of the contextual elements. As far as acts of private autonomy are concerned, exemplified by contracts, I will argue that the cooperative principle is applicable, at least in those legal systems that include the principle of bona fides among the interpretative regulations of such acts.     

THE SEMANTICS OF SYMBOLIC SPEECH

More than half a century ago, the Supreme Court held that the free speech protection of the First Amendment is not limited to verbal communication, but also applies to such expressive conduct as saluting a flag or burning a flag. Even though the Supreme Court has decided a number of important cases involving expressive conduct, the Court has never announced any standards for distinguishing such conduct from conduct without communicative value. The aim of this paper is to examine which conceptions of nonverbal expression underlie judicial decisions on expressive conduct, and to offer an account of expressive conduct grounded in contemporary semantic theory. The central hypothesis of this paper is that significance of expressive conduct can be explained by principles that explain important features of linguistic meaning. I propose an analysis of expressive conduct that takes the meaningfulness of conduct as a function of the action and its consequences in context. I develop a theory of expressive conduct whose underlying conception of expression is based on a number of ideas from speech act theory. These are Grice's account of nonnatural meaning, Austin's theory of illocutionary force, and Grice's work on conversational implicature. My analysis understands the meaningfulness of conduct in terms of its relational properties and relevant features of the context upon which illocutionary force, perlocutionary properties and implicature are predicated. The natural and conventional properties of types of conduct, features of the context, and underlying social and cultural presumptions and expectations about human conduct thus play a role in the constitution of symbolic speech. This revised version was published online in November 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Out of the Fly-Bottle: Conceptual Confusions in Multilingual Legislation

Conceptual confusions permeate all forms of intellectual pursuit. Many have contended that multilingual legislation, i.e., one law enacted in different languages, is unviable when carried out by means of translation. But not many have realized that the same would also be true of drafting if their contention could be justified. My involvement in the translation of Hong Kong laws into Chinese in the run-up to 1997 exposed me to a whole world of myths and misconceptions about legal translation arising from our failure to command a clear view of the workings of language. Over the years I have endeavoured to come to grips with the problems inherent in legal translation, showing that the arguments against the possibility of exact translation, against the possibility of achieving equivalence between different language texts of the law, and against the possibility of bridging the conceptual gap between legal terminologies in different languages, are all ill-grounded and misguided. There are indeed enormous difficulties in drafting and translating multilingual law, but they are essentially of a technical nature, by no means theoretically irresolvable. The viability of multilingual legislation is simply grounded in our innate communicative intention to use signs and symbols to convey meaning. As language users, we are capable of making language work for us for any particular purpose. Just as we can translate the rules of chess from one language to another whereby players speaking different languages can play the same game called “chess”, we don’t see why we can’t do the same with multilingual legislation. The door has always been open!     

The Space of Law and the Law of Space

This essay investigates the interconnections between early Greek cosmology and legal theory. In particular, it demonstrate that spatial and legal concepts developed hand in hand, and that it would be mistaken to assume that legal terminology in cosmology, and/or spatial terminology in legal texts, are best read metaphorically. This state of affairs may be contrasted with contemporary legal theory, which often employs spatial terms metaphorically. The principal authors I␣consider are Solon, Anaxamander, Heraclitus and Parmenides. The essay concludes that justice and space/place were, for the Early Greeks, often equated—that distinct differing meanings for the two were not yet clearly established, and so, in a sense, there was both a spatial component to law, and a legal component to space.     

法律行为的效力依据

法律行为的效力依据一直就是法律行为理论中较有争议的话题。在长期的发展中形成了意思说、信赖说、折衷说、规范说等观点,这些观点从不同的角度论述了法律行为的效力依据,但也有明显的不足之处。法律行为的效力依据是意思与法律规范的结合,行为主体按照自己的意思,使自己的行为符合法律关于法律行为的成立和生效要件,从而使之产生法律行为的效力。     

刑法关怀与刑法解释

刑法应体现法律之公平善良的特质 ,刑法关怀是指刑法对自然人、社会组织及社会所给予的刑法关注、刑法抵御和刑法保护 ,刑法解释即有权解释 ,是指有权机关依据一定原则使用法定方法对法律文本所作的阐释 ,是连结刑事立法与刑法适用的纽带和中介 ,是折射和反映刑法关怀的最佳视角。欠缺刑法关怀的刑法解释在一定程度上说可能是合法的但未必是合理的。从刑法关怀的维度审视我国现有的刑法解释 ,一方面在于把刑法关怀坚持到底 ,另一方面在于反思刑法解释的真正科学的定位 ,由此建立合法合理的刑法解释体系。