Waisman

'Friedrich Waismann and the Distinctive Logic of Legal Language' by Frederick Schauer, written as a keynote address for a University of Vienna/Vienna Circle conference on Friedrich Waismann’s Legacy and Presence, comments

 Although Waismann’s contributions to legal theory are best known through H.L.A. Hart’s use of Waismann’s idea of open texture, many of Waismann’s writings also offer the suggestion that different linguistic domains have their own distinctive grammars and structures in addition to their own semantics. In “Language Strata,” in “Analytic-Synthetic,” in “The Linguistic Technique,” and elsewhere, Waismann thus gave us some of the resources to consider the extent, if at all, that legal language should be understood as a technical language with domain-specific structure, including a structure of meaning that emerges out of law’s own goals and methods. More particularly, the paper explores the possibility that law’s pervasive (even if not strictly necessary) defeasibility infuses the meaning not only of specific legal words, but of all of legal language.