Interpretivism is a school of thought in contemporary jurisprudence and the philosophy of law.

Overview

The main claims of interpretivism are that In the English-speaking world, interpretivism is usually identified with Ronald Dworkin's thesis on the nature of law as discussed in his text titled Law's Empire, which is sometimes seen as a third way between natural law and legal positivism. The concept also includes continental legal hermeneutics and authors such as Helmut Coing and Emilio Betti. Legal hermeneutics can be seen as a branch of philosophical hermeneutics, whose main authors in the 20th century are Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, both drawing on Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. Hermeneutics has now expanded to many varied areas of research in the social sciences as an alternative to a conventionalist approach. In a wider sense, interpretivism includes even the theses of, in chronological order, Josef Esser, Theodor Viehweg, Chaïm Perelman, Wolfgang Fikentscher, António Castanheira Neves, Friedrich Müller, Aulis Aarnio, and Robert Alexy.