The Empirical Turn in Legal Interpretation

Are empirical methods going to affect interpretative outcomes? Or are they going to change the very meaning of legal interpretation? In this essay, I explore these two questions with regard to both the role of the interpreter and the choice of interpretative strategies. The role of the interpreter is discussed by the empirical literature on judicial behaviour, as well as by the literature on the institutional interplay among interpreters. The choice of interpretative strategies is at the centre of the debate on the use of several empirical methods: corpus linguistics, surveys, and Large Language Models. I make two arguments: on one hand, empirical methods are unlikely to be the only decisive factor for interpretative outcomes in any legal system; on the other hand, in some legal systems there could be institutional factors favouring the uptake of empirical methods and leading to systemic changes in how interpretative work is understood and practised. These arguments are relevant for the methodological debate in comparative legal studies: if empirical approaches are tightly linked to institutional contexts, a comparative analysis cannot ignore their potential role and impact in each legal system.