The Political Character of the (Theory of) Interpretation of Law. Stanley Fish’s Neo-pragmatist Perspective

Keywords: jurisprudence, the political, neopragmatism, interpretive community, hermeneutic universalism, interpretation

Abstract: In this paper, I analyse the political character of the interpretation of law and the political nature of the theory of legal interpretation from Stanley Fish’s neo-pragmatist perspective. In the first part of the text, I define the concept of politics and the political, borrowing from Chantal Mouffe. I clearly distinguish between the political, politics, and policy; this article uses the first concept (the political). In the second part of the article, I characterize hermeneutic universalism as one of the approaches to the problem of legal interpretation.

In the third part, following the characteristics of the concepts of interpretive communities as defined by Stanley Fish, I draw conclusions about the political nature of the interpretation of law and the theory of the interpretation of law. In conclusion, I analyse the possibilities of building a theory of legal interpretation that internalises the inherently political character of knowledge by analyzing the concept of post-analytical philosophy proposed in literature by Andrzej Bator.