Law as a hermeneutical science: the legal dimension of human action

Abstract

Charles Taylor considers human sciences as hermeneutical sciences. These would be those that deal with the meaning of texts, actions, signs and other "bearers of meaning," created by human beings for other human beings. From this point of view, the law would enter the field of hermeneutical sciences. However, an interpretation of the Law cannot be limited to interpreting the normative as a bearer of meaning, that is, it cannot be limited to the textual. The Law has a double agenda: its matters of interest are, on the one hand, human action and the context in which it develops understood as “the social” and, on the other, the textual-regulatory or the normative, in perpetual remission and confrontation Hermeneutics must find in law the meaning of this confrontation between human action and regulatory text that is proper to it. Thus, the traditional legal hermeneutics, understood as interpretation of the legal statements or texts, is mistaken in reducing the legal to the normative, maintaining an excessively univocal view of the law. Based on this premise, we propose a legal hermeneutic that does not forget the dynamic relationship between human action and norm. We are inspired by the works of Viola and Zaccaria, Richard Rorty, Kauffman and Ricoeur. From this perspective we will study the hermeneutic position of those who are for us the three great interpreters of the law, without being able to exclude any of them: the legislator, the citizen and the applicator itself (judge or official) without losing sight of the fact that the law, as a hermeneutical science is intended to give meaning and meaning to human action.

Doi: https://doi.org/10.17398/2695-7728.35.397