To this point we have argued that the interpretation of canonical legal texts is at bottom no different from interpreting demands or requests in other domains of life.

That is so whether those texts are authored by individual lawmakers or by multi-member ones. All communications that we take to be normative boil down to what the language in its con­text reveals about what the speaker intended for us to do.

If legal reasoning in the domain of interpreting canonical legal texts is to be a craft that only legal training and practice can provide, then our intentionalist position must be rejected. All of us are ‘trained' to practice intentionalist interpretation, as all of us engage in it all the time. And, indeed, there are challengers to intentionalism in the legal literature. In this chapter we take up the two principal challengers: textualism and dynamic interpretation.

4.1