Lexical Narrowing or Legal Explicitation as a Method of Legal Interpretation

Abstract

This article introduces a new category into the legal discourse, one not yet recognized by scholars and practitioners and often conflated with restrictive interpretation grounded in teleological distinguishing or with restrictive application of a previously identified norm: lexical narrowing or, more simply, legal explicitation. Lexical narrowing makes explicit — based on the sentence’s syntactic–semantic structure or on the discourse to which it belongs — what the legislature originally set forth restrictively. Teleological distinguishing restricts — based on the goal adjacent to the utterance — what the legislature broadly set forth in the hypothesis of a norm. Restrictive application of a norm excludes from the scope of application of a previously identified norm a case as to which there is doubt about its inclusion. Distinguishing legal explicitation from other methods of legal interpretation and application is essential because in some fields of law literal interpretation is mandatory and extensive or restrictive interpretation and analogical application of a norm are prohibited. Employing linguistic explicitation allows the interpreter to reconstruct the literal and grammatical meaning of a legal provision, thus operating within what many sectors of law legally permit for identifying the content of a legal norm.