Andre Mammer's Research On Legal Interpretation

In the research of legal theory, legal interpretation has become one of the main paradigm to legal scholars. Among all the legal interpretation theories in the history, Andrei Marmor's theory is one of the distinguished ones. On the one hand, Marmor inherited form Hart and Dworkin on this issue critically; on the other hand, Marmor has his own contribution in finding the moral soundness of the legal interpretation and Purpose Theory in the interpretation method.This article will focus on Marmor's theory, and hope that his theory can inspire the development of legal system of China, especially for Chinese legal interpretation theory. This article is divided into four parts, chapter 1 introduces the the basic concepts Marmor used in his research, and discusses what is interpretation and how to define it, as well as the philosophical basis of interpretation. Chapter 2 mainly talks about the position of Marmor in the research of legal interpretation. Raz J. was Marmor's tutor and Hart was the tutor of Raz, so this kind of study experience made Marmor firmly stand in the position of legal positivism and then caused him to use this kind of perspective to study on the legal interpretation. It is this kind of legal positivism position that can be used to rebut Dworkin's challenge, because Dworkin thought that interpretation is the pre-condition of application of law, while Marmor thought that understanding rules is enough to follow the law. Chapter 3 is about the Marmor's own theory. His theory can be summarized into two theses, one is the "exception thesis",and one is "intention thesis" which is an important factor to justify the moral soundness of legal interpretation. Chapter 4 is about the inspiration of Marmor's theory can bring us, and this kind of inspiration can be found in the juris practice in China and in the legal research in China.The final part of this article holds the view that the focus point of the contemporary legal research has been transformed from the law enactment to the interpretation theory, and the study on the western legal theory can provide us some with inspiring views. Also, legal interpretation is a very practical area,so we need to summarize theories from the practice, and it is also the goal for the scholars to pursuit for.