“What’s the Plan?” On Interpretation and Meta-interpretation in Scott Shapiro’s Legalidad

Abstract

Scott Shapiro’s book, Legalidad, is a very rich and challenging contribution to analytical legal philosophy. The aim of this essay is to explain and evaluate Shapiro’s theory of legal interpretation, as outlined in Legalidad – an important part of Shapiro’s theoretical enterprise that has not yet attracted, as far as I know, much interest in the already conspicuous literature on this book. More specifically, I will try to provide a) a reconstruction of Shapiro’s theory of legal interpretation, as it is developed in Legalidad; b) an assessment of this theory of interpretation on its own terms (i. e. its internal coherence, its overall persuasiveness) and c) an evaluation of the compatibility of this theory of legal interpretation with the general project of “Law as Plan”.