Interpretivism is a school of thought in contemporary jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. In the English speaking world, interpretivism is usually identified with Ronald Dworkin's theses on the nature of law, but the word can also cover continental legal hermeneutics and authors such as Helmut Coing and Emilio Betti. Legal hermeneutics can be seen as a branch of philosophical hermeneutics, whose main authors are Heidegger and Gadamer.
In a wider sense, interpretivism could even include the theses of, in chronological order, Josef Esser, Theodor Viehweg, Chaïm Perelman, Wolfgang Fikentscher, Castanheira Neves, Friedrich Müller, Aulis Aarnio and Robert Alexy.
The main claims of interpretivism are:
- Law is not a set of given data, conventions or physical facts, but what lawyers aim to construct or obtain in their practice. This marks a first difference between interpretivism and legal positivism.
- There is no separation between law and morality, although there are differences. This is the opposite of the main claim of legal positivism.
- Law is not immanent in nature nor do legal values and principles exist independently and outside of the legal practice itself. This is the opposite of the main claim of natural law theory.
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