Legal Commentary

We are in the business of interpreting words, so it seems odd that prominent philosophers of mind, meaning, and language are virtually invisible in legal scholarship. Aside from Michael Moore (the jurisprude, not the movie maker), I cannot think of any legal academics who have written about the relationship between semantics and moral theory. Citations to the greats of philosophy of language -- Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, etc -- are rare in the law reviews even when the law reviews discuss philosophy of law. Larry Solum discusses semantic theories in his work on originalism, but there is (to my knowledge) no entry in his Legal Theory Lexicon dealing with reference theory, semantics, or philosophy of language more generally. A collection of essays on Objectivity in Law and Morals edited by Brian Leiter contains a single "cf. citation" to Donald Davidson but otherwise seems to be silent about philosophy of language --an omission that is especially weird since the third volume of Donald Davidson's philosophical papers are devoted to the distinction between the subjective and objective, and Davidson is widely regarded as one of the giants of philosophy in the twentieth century. It is almost as if Leiter and his authors consciously decided to give philosophy of mind and language the cold shoulder.

So why are we lawyers and our fellow traveling legal philosophers so indifferent to philosophy of language? Is it simply a result of a sort of path-dependent sociology of knowledge? Perhaps the agenda set by H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, and Joseph Raz dominates legal scholars' agenda, simply because their students predominate among legal philosophers sitting on law faculties. Or is there some other explanation? One prominent legal philosopher who shall remain nameless opined that Davidson, Putnam, & Co. are simply too difficult: It is much easier to argue one more round about Riggs v Palmer than to untangle Tarski's truth definition. But I do not buy this explanation: Law profs grapple with tough empirical methodologies, and law faculties hire rigorous political scientists. Why shy away from the one of field of philosophy that would seem to be most closely related to what lawyers do -- namely, interpret language? Interest in post-modern theories of interpretation (thankfully) seems to be flagging: It would be nice if they were replaced by some interest in the real McCoy.