Transparencia y duda: Comprensión e interpretación en pragmática y en derecho

Abstract

Legal discourse traditionally views “interpretation” as called for only when the meaning of some term is doubtful or otherwise problematic. The key maxims in this tradition are: *clara non sunt interpretanda* and *interpretatio cessat in claris*. Such a tradition presupposes a “naive” conception of discourse understanding and assigns to legal language properties it does not in fact possess. In this paper, we propose a more realistic view of the characteristics of legal language which, coupled with insights gathered from pragmatics —the theory of language use— allow for a broader, and yet systematic use of the notion of interpretation in legal discourse.