From the Linguistic Turn to the Interpretative Turn: Legal Hermeneutics Compared with Legal Analytical Philosophy

Abstract

The interpretative turn that characterized the legal philosophical debate in the last decades offers a privileged viewpoint to observe the dispute between legal analytical philosophy and legal hermeneutics. On one hand it is certainly true that the two traditions of thought have actually been converging for many years; on the other, it is worth noting that legal analytical philosophers are struggling to accept the interpretative turn and, as a consequence, to abandon the neutrality thesis peculiar of methodological legal positivism. Looking at the hermeneutics instead, its next step should be that of rejecting the one right answer thesis, with the awareness that it does not necessarily lead to surrender to arbitrary decisionism.