This blog post examines how the clarity of law and the limits of interpretation both clash and harmonize. It focuses particularly on the extent to which judicial interpretation can be justified.
Following the French Revolution, the conviction took firm hold that laws must be clearly written to eliminate room for arbitrary judicial interpretation. Within this modern legal framework, laws must be enacted in a manner comprehensible to every individual subject to their application. Only when citizens can understand what the law stipulates can behavior be guided and evaluated through the law. Consequently, in criminal law, the content of penal statutes must be clearly defined in advance, and interpretations exceeding the limits implied by the statutory text are prohibited. The constitutional ideal of a state governed by the rule of law also established the principle that the content of laws must be clear to prevent arbitrary enforcement. Here, the requirement for clarity does not mean the text must be absolutely unambiguous. Situations unforeseen at the time of enactment can always arise, and precisely for this reason, laws must necessarily take a general and abstract form. Therefore, the clarity of laws is a concept that does not exclude the necessity for certain interpretations.
Generally, when clarifying the meaning of legal texts through interpretation, the intent of the legislature or the objective purpose of the law itself may also be referenced. While this interpretive method may seem valid at first glance, it has actually faced significant criticism. First, determining what the intent of the legislature or the objective purpose of the law is proves difficult in itself. A more serious problem is that it is unreasonable to expect ordinary citizens, who are not legal experts, to grasp what the law requires by considering such elements. The point of legal clarity is that the work of specifying the meaning of the text must be performed within the limits of the public’s level of understanding; it does not mean that the specified content itself can be taken for granted as something the public will actually comprehend. Furthermore, interpretations that consider the legislator’s intent or the objective purpose of the law often go beyond merely specifying the meaning of the text; they are frequently utilized in ways that exceed the text’s boundaries and are thus prone to abuse.
Meanwhile, a more fundamental problem arises when interpretation for the application of law is viewed not as a simple recognition of a given subject but as an active process of constructing the meaning of the text. While legislators should not enact laws with ambiguous regulatory content open to multiple interpretations, if the regulatory content of a law is only truly constituted after judicial interpretation, it becomes fundamentally impossible for citizens to know it at the time of their actions and use it as a guide for their conduct. Moreover, the principle of separation of powers, whereby the enactment and application of laws are respectively the responsibility of the legislative and judicial branches, becomes difficult to realize from the outset.
Does this mean the modern legal project must be abandoned as inherently fictitious or unattainable? We can respond as follows. First, the insight that legal interpretation possesses a meaning-constructing function does not immediately lead to the conclusion that this constitutive activity is entirely left to the interpreter’s arbitrariness and subjective judgment. Just as the meaning of a word is determined by the way it is used, and just as language use here is not private but collective and guided by social rules, the various methodological rules related to legal interpretation also appropriately limit the interpreter’s freedom. Second, the problem can be mitigated or resolved by understanding the limits of interpretation or the principle of legal clarity as a principle directed at experts such as judges. In other words, even if a law is enacted somewhat ambiguously, such that the average layperson cannot directly grasp its precise meaning, it may not be a major problem if its meaning can be ascertained through the judge’s supplementary interpretation.
Yet, questions remain even regarding this response. The ideal that each citizen must understand what the law requires had already undergone a compromise through the process of introducing the abstract concept of the ‘average person’. Introducing the criterion of ‘expert’ to further reduce the burden on legislators risks straying excessively far from the core issues raised by the modern legal project. This debate remains a crucial legal-philosophical task today, and discussions surrounding the clarity of laws and the limits of interpretation continue to be revisited as essential examinations of the operating principles of the legislative and judicial systems.
