In this part we shall take up the interpretation of legal rules.
These rules can be promulgated by legislatures (statutes), by administrative agencies or individual administrators (administrative rules and orders), or by courts or individual judges (precedent rules and judicial orders).
As this list of rule promulgators shows, they may be individual persons - the president, a mayor, a judge - or they may be multi-membered bodies such as legislatures or appellate courts. It also includes constitutional ratifiers and their product.If society is to be governed by rules, it is necessary that those rules be understandable by those to be guided by them. This includes not only citizens generally but also lawyers advising clients and judges adjudicating legal disputes. Clear guidance is, we have argued in Chapter 1, rules' raison d’etre. But realistically, the meaning of many rules will be unclear to some. And even when the meaning of the rules is clear, it is useful to consider how that meaning is ascertained. What determines a rule's meaning?
Is there some type of special reasoning or methodology employed when those to whom posited rules apply interpret those rules? Is interpreting legal rules a special form of reasoning, one that only the legally trained employ?
We argue that it is not. Interpretation of posited legal rules is nothing that requires a legal education to master. It is imbued with no mystique. Our view is that interpretation of legal rules is commonsensical. Because posited rules are communications from lawmakers of what they have determined others should do, the texts in which their rules are encoded should be read accordingly. If the legislature enacts a law ‘prohibiting the keeping of wild animals in residential areas', and that is the meaning the legislature intends to communicate through the law's text, then property owners comply with the law if they do not keep wild animals on their residential property, and law enforcers such as the police, prosecutors, and courts comply if they enforce that prohibition.
Notice that we have not treated the meaning of that statute any differently from how we treat a letter from our parents asking us to put out the dog when they next visit, or a note signed by our three children asking us to bring in Chinese for dinner. With respect to the statute, the parental letter, and the children's note, our aim is the same: we want to determine what the legislature is prohibiting and what the parents and children are requesting.
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