Reasonableness of Limits, Reasonableness as Limit (in Legal Interpretation)

This short essay aims at discussing the opposition between two different views on limits in legal interpretations: I will call them (i) “no-limits option” and (ii) “pro- limits option”. As for (i), it is based on a widely diffused understanding of individual freedom: that of an unceasing breaking of all limits. This idea involves nowadays not only a number of once accepted moral limits, nor the material or social limits suffered by people, but also the limits of conceptual determinations. As for (ii), it is based on the conjecture that limit would be the condition of “no longer, not yet”—as such, a matter of authentic freedom. The “no-limits option” can easily lead, in legal interpretation, to a radical contextualism according to which there would be unlim- ited meanings for a syntactically and semantically same legal text. The “pro-limits option”, on the contrary, maintains that the existence of limits is reasonable, and that reasonableness is itself a limit to interpretation. In other words, the undetermined space of “no longer, not yet” in which the limits consist of is open to exploration on and beyond through appropriate procedures of reason-giving. According to the “pro- limits option”, a reasonably common core-meaning of a legal text should be sought also when cases of application vary—and that would be precisely the nature of legal interpretation. Arguments in favor of this thesis can be found in Western philosophy from Aristotle to contemporary neurosciences (according to which reasonableness is natural). A remarkable consequence of my discussion on these two options deals with the concept of normativity, given that option (i) conceives normativity only as an expression of will (the one to establish and to infringe limits), whereas option (ii) links normativity to reasonableness.