Interpretation and Construction

In recent years, it has become apparent that there is a difference between (a) discovering the semantic meaning of the words in the text of the Constitution, and (b) putting that meaning into effect by applying it in particular cases and controversies. To capture this difference, following the lead of political science professor Keith Whittington, legal scholars are increasingly distinguishing between the activities of “interpretation” and “construction.” Although the Supreme Court unavoidably engages in both activities, it is useful to keep these categories separate. For one thing, if originalism is a theory of interpretation, then it may be of limited utility in formulating a theory of construction, other than in requiring that original meaning not be disregarded or undermined. This Essay elaborates and defends the importance of distinguishing interpretation from construction for the benefit of those who may not be entirely familiar with the distinction between these two activities. Although the author begins by offering definitions of interpretation and construction, the labels are not important. Both activities could be called “interpretation”—for example, something like “semantic interpretation” and “applicative interpretation.” Still, the terms “interpretation” and “construction” are of ancient vintage and, although not always precisely defined in this way, were traditionally used to distinguish between these two different activities in which courts and other constitutional actors routinely engage when dealing with authoritative writings, be they contracts, statutes, or the Constitution

Interpretation and Construction in Contract Law

Interpretation determines the meaning of a legal actor’s words and actions, construction their legal effect. Although the interpretation-construction distinction has a long pedigree, contract scholars today rarely attend to it, and the relationship between the two activities remains understudied. This Article provides an account of the interplay between interpretation and construction in contract law. It begins with the history of the concepts, focusing on the works of Lieber, Williston and Corbin. It adopts Corbin’s complimentary conception, according to which interpretation alone never suffices to determine speech act’s legal effects; a rule of construction is always required. The Article departs from Corbin, however, by arguing that contract law recognizes multiple types of meaning, and therefore calls for different types of interpretation. Legally relevant meanings include plain meaning, contextually determined use meaning, subjective and objective meanings, purpose, and the parties’ beliefs and intentions. Which type of meaning is legally relevant when depends on the applicable rule of construction. Consequently, although interpretation comes first in the process of determining parties’ legal obligations, the correct approach to legal interpretation is determined by rules of construction. The Article identifies two additional ways construction can be said to be prior to interpretation in contract law. First, judicial acts of construction can attach to contract boilerplate standard legal effects that depart from the words’ ordinary meaning, turning them into a legal formality. Acts of construction can thereby give boilerplate new semantic meanings, to which interpretation must attend. Second, when parties choose their words in light of their legal effects, rules of construction often figure into their communicative intentions. Rules of construction can therefore also be prior the pragmatic meaning of what parties say and do. Understanding this complex interplay between interpretation and construction is essential to understanding how the law determines the existence and content of contractual obligations. Although this Article does not argue for one or another rule of interpretation or construction, it lays the groundwork for analyses of which rules are appropriate when

Interpretation and Construction in Altering Rules

This essay is a response to Ian Ayres\u27s, Regulating Opt-Out: An Economic Theory of Altering Rules, 121 Yale L.J. 2032 (2012). Ayres identifies an important question: How does the law decide when parties have opted-out of a contractual default? Unfortunately, his article tells only half of the story about such altering rules. Ayres cares about rules designed to instruct parties on how to get the terms that they want. By focusing on such rules he ignores altering rules designed instead to interpret the nonlegal meaning of the parties\u27 acts or agreement. This limited vision is characteristic of economic approaches to contract law. Valuable as they are for identifying the incentives, intended or unintended, that legal rules create, they tend to overlook other functions of contract law. The essay develops these points by applying the interpretation-construction distinction to Ayres\u27s theory. It distinguishes between two categories of altering rules, juristic and hermeneutic. Juristic altering rules are designed to help parties get the legal outcomes they want, though as Ayres points out, such rules also might attempt to slow parties with extra transaction costs. Hermeneutic altering rules condition legal change on the nonlegal meanings of what the parties say and do. Their application therefore requires a broader form of interpretation. The essay identifies the connections between each type of rule and more general principles and purposes of contract law. And it argues that attention to hermeneutic altering rules can fill in some of the gaps in Ayres\u27s account, such as explaining why juristic altering rules often specify sufficient but non-necessary means of effecting a legal change

Contracts, Constitutions, and Getting the Interpretation-Construction Distinction Right

Interpretation determines the meaning of a legal actor’s words or other significant acts, construction their legal effect. Using contract law and then two nineteenth century theories of constitutional interpretation as examples, this Article advances four claims about interpretation, construction, and the relationship between the two. First, many theorists, following Francis Lieber, assume that rules of construction apply only when interpretation runs out, such as when a text’s meaning is ambiguous or does not address an issue. In fact, a rule of construction is always necessary to determine a legal speech act’s effect, including when its meaning is clear and definite. Construction does not supplement interpretation, but compliments it. Second, there exists more than one form of interpretation, and correspondingly more than one type of meaning. The meaning a text or other speech act has depends on the questions one asks of it. Third, which type of meaning is legally relevant depends on the applicable rule of construction. Rules of construction are in this sense conceptually prior to legal rules of interpretation. This priority has important consequences for how legal rules of interpretation are justified. Finally, because there exist multiple types of meaning, when one form of interpretation runs out, another form might step in. Whether that is so again depends on the applicable rule of construction.These four claims apply to legal interpretation and construction generally. This Article supports them with a close examination of the interpretation and construction of contractual agreements. It then argues that this account of interpretation and construction illuminates the shared structure of Joseph Story’s and Thomas Cooley’s theories of constitutional interpretation, and by extension theories of constitutional interpretation generally

[[alternative]]Interpretation and Construction of Landscape Narratives

計畫編號：NSC92-2415-H032-015研究期間：200308~200407研究經費：342,000[[abstract]]本計畫由文化地景的討論出發，嘗試建立一關於地景的理論性架構，以「地景敘事體」的概念整合地景閱讀、地景研究、與地景書寫的多元論述，進而探索以此銜接地景規劃設計（地景建築）發展的可行性。「地景敘事體」是一個跨地景研究及敘事理論的提議，其中還涉及人文地理、文化研究、文學理論等相關領域，因此，以敘事結構串連不同「故事」與「論述」，再現地景主題，乃是本計畫理論藉由操作方法模擬之具體實踐。 論述發展先以理論研究為主軸，一方面建構地景理論及敘事理論的關係，另方面由文本內容分析切入，由不同「再現」媒介或形式，解讀地景意涵及敘事結構，探究文本交相指涉、解構、後設觀點所開展的敘事形式對「地景敘事體」建構可能的啟發；據以延伸一般地景研究的理論向度，或在傳統地景規劃設計的基地分析流程中，深化概念發展與地景內涵的互動。 研究計畫再以一文化地景真實案例的空間實踐檢驗前階段方法論的內涵。基地選擇台北公館新店溪旁的寶藏巖聚落，主要因其特殊地景形式與文脈，在近年聚落保存與都市計畫拆除違建的角力下，不斷被不同「作者」詮釋、書寫，又因其社會邊緣處境，引發了影像藝術及藝術村規劃的聯想，空間過程充滿敘事張力。而在2003年的實驗性藝術行動GAPP 中，眾多外來藝術個人及團隊就寶藏巖聚落特質提出藝術計畫，透過有意識的行動介入，與聚落社區及地景開展對話。其中關於文化主體與地方認同在地景敘事中的辯證，跳脫了過去社區營造口號下的理所當然，對地景意義生產的過程誘生了多層次的思辯，也在原空間脈絡下重構了地景文本。這些不同的地景敘事體打開了詮釋的邊界與結構性的結局，成為部分地景意義的載體，對未來有意識的規劃設計干預和文化地景與都市地景的閱讀都將有所啟發。[[abstract]]Starting with an array of discourses on cultural landscape, this project attempts to establish a theoretic framework about landscape, and adopts the concept of 'landscape narrative' to integrate a great diversity of discourses from academic landscape studies, landscape writing, and landscape interpretation; then further explores the feasibility of linking it with the conceptualizing process of landscape planning and design. Landscape narrative is a cross-disciplinary proposal based largely on landscape studies and narrative theory, and inevitably involving the fields of human geography, cultural studies, and literary theory; therefore, plotting an effective narrative structure to connect different 'stories' and 'discourses' and to represent the landscape subject is itself an embodiment of theoretic praxis. The first part of the thesis is focused on theoretic researches, which structuralize the relationship between landscape theory and narrative theory on one hand; while on the other hand, apply the method of content analysis to decode landscape meaning and narrative structure of various media and forms of representation, and further probe into the studies of 'intertextuality,' 'deconstruction,' and 'meta-narrative' as experimental concepts for structuring landscape narratives. On such grounding, the theoretic dimension of general landscape studies can be expanded, and the interaction between landscape content and conceptualization of landscape planning and design is also reinforced. The second half of the thesis employs spatial practices of a physical landscape to evaluate the established theory of landscape narrative as well as to re-interpret the landscape meaning of the site according to such a perspective. The Treasure Hill settlement, located at the edge of Taipei city, is chosen due to her isolated status and particular landscape form and context – especially her marginal condition of mixing various periods of rural immigrants and social underclass attracts many associated imaginations from cinema directors and artists. The Treasure Hill narrative has been re-written by different authors in recent years under the struggle between landscape conservation and squatter demolition policies. Her spatial processes are high-strung with narrative tension. And in the experimental GAPP (Global Artivists Participation Project) of 2003, many individuals and teams bring up artivist proposals according to the landscape characteristics of Treasure Hill, and engage in serious dialogues with the community and landscape via spatial interventions of conscious acts. The dialectics about cultural subjects and place identity in the landscape narratives break away from the much taken-for-granted slogan of community renaissance, hence induce multi-layers of retrospection on the production of landscape meanings and reconstruct landscape texts within the extant spatial context. These landscape narratives open up the boundaries and structural ends of interpretations, and become the containers of local landscape meanings. These discourses augment perceivable dimensions to future planning and design and will hopefully inspire further reading of cultural and urban landscape.[[sponsorship]]行政院國家科學委員

A Sketch of Deleuze’s Hermeneutical Spin

The aim of this article is to sketch the procedural nature of the modus in which Deleuze reads the other philosophers. The hermeneutical problem indicated by the indecision to consider his books on different authors as an authorized interpretation or as fantasist utilization may be scattered if we understand his hermeneutical attempts both as interpretation and construction. In addition, this indecision affects the guild of Deleuzian exegetes in respect to the directory idea which could point out the general strategy of his philosophy

Representations of celestial coordinates in FITS

In Paper I, Greisen & Calabretta (2002) describe a generalized method for assigning physical coordinates to FITS image pixels. This paper implements this method for all spherical map projections likely to be of interest in astronomy. The new methods encompass existing informal FITS spherical coordinate conventions and translations from them are described. Detailed examples of header interpretation and construction are given.Comment: Consequent to Paper I: "Representations of world coordinates in FITS". 45 pages, 38 figures, 13 tables, aa macros v5.2 (2002/Jun). Both papers submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics (2002/07/19). Replaced to try to get figure and table placement right (no textual changes