NYU professor and legal philosopher discusses interpretation
—By Lori Craig
Leading legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin presented the Seventh Annual Law and Humanities Distinguished Lecture, titled “What Makes an Interpretation True?”
Dworkin—professor of philosophy and Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University, as well as professor of jurisprudence at Oxford and fellow of University College—spoke to an audience of more than 150 gathered at Town and Gown Feb. 25.
Interpretation is undertaken in a variety of categories, he said, and within each category are many different activities that count as interpretation. For example, lawyers interpret documents; sociologists and anthropologists interpret cultures; critics interpret poems, plays and pictures; and historians interpret events and epics.
“For those engaged in interpretation, it feels on the whole as if they are attempting to find the truth, and those who disagree with them are in error,” Dworkin said.
Yet people often attempt to consider all interpretations equally sound, which “won’t do,” he added.
“Interpretation seeks truth, and it wouldn’t properly be interpretation if it didn’t,” Dworkin said. “And yet, we are most hesitant just to say flatly that one interpretation … is right, and all the others are wrong. That sounds arrogant, and we seek, sometimes ridiculous ways of avoiding it. We say such things as, ‘This is my opinion, but it’s only my opinion,’ which makes absolutely no sense at all.”
Dworkin offered what he termed the practice theory of interpretation.
“An interpretation is true when that interpretation of some object makes that object the best it can be, given the correct understanding of the point of the genre of interpretation in which the activity is correctly located,” he said. “This explanation contains already the explanation of our hesitation, our embarrassment, at claiming truth, the other side of the apparent paradox.”
Lawyers, Dworkin said, disagree about how to interpret the Constitution because they differ on matters of justice and fairness, with opposing viewpoints about the correct allocation of interpretive responsibility between legislature and judge and about the character of democracy, among other issues.
“These disagreements ramify and extend in a thousand directions so that the disagreement between any two interpreters about whether the Second Amendment grants a right to bear arms [for example]…can be traced – if we had the material to do the tracing – into differences about what democracy is, what our democracy is, and what justice requires,” Dworkin said.
Dworkin is one of the leading theorists of law, politics and morality. His major works include A Bill of Rights for Britain (1990), Life’s Dominion (1993), and Freedom’s Law (1996).
The annual Law and Humanities Distinguished Lecture is presented by the USC Center for Law, History and Culture.
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