Every legal system is challenged by the inevitable ambiguity of legal signs. And every legal system struggles to extract a clear meaning from legal texts. This seems incongruous, since legal norms—as rules that regulate and sanction human behaviour—ideally ought to be as unambiguous as possible for reasons of legal certainty. In codified civil law, the requirement to formulate legal norms with sufficient precision is usually understood as deriving from the rule of law. This requirement also binds Roman Catholic canon law. As codified law, canon law is bound by the compositional rules of modern statutory law, including the requirement of unambiguousness and definiteness, which is intended to provide the ecclesiastical legal subjects with legal certainty. However, law including canon law often undermines this requirement—sometimes involuntarily, sometimes deliberately—by introducing ambiguous terms or unclear sentences. For example, when canonical norms of sacramental law or penal law resort to the ambiguous term “sin”, they are in effect refusing to describe in clear legal terms precisely what conduct in church is considered to limit ecclesiastical rights or to be worthy of sanction. Many of these ambiguities are not accidental. And they are not trivialities, as they can give rise to a certain justified unease among ecclesiastical appliers of the law as well as legal subjects, even encouraging them to question the character of canon law as law. A comparison that examines theories of interpretation and methodological standards of secular and canon law makes it possible to better understand why this is so.
This article seeks to shed more light on this difficult issue of deciphering the meaning of laws in four steps. First, it explains that legal texts—like all texts—are inevitably ambiguous (1.). Second, as a fabric of signs that know more than one meaning, legal texts seldom convey an unambiguous message, but disclose their meaning only through interpretation (2.) Third, in order to avoid arbitrary interpretative results, the disambiguation of norms through interpretation is usually governed by rules of interpretation. A comparative approach to different theories of interpretation reveals that these methodologies are legion and very diverse. They can come into conflict when different theories and methods of finding legal meaning collide (3.). This is fairly often the case when interpreting global canon law, for instance when legal interpreters in the local churches interpret universal norms of Roman Vatican origin by applying theories and methods of interpretation influenced by Anglo-American common law or continental civil law in order to gain legal meaning. This can result in conflicts that burden the search for legal meaning and raise the question of the legal character of canon law, as I propose in the conclusion (4.).
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