ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that legal practice is an exercise in interpretation not only when lawyers interpret particular documents or statutes, but generally. It proposes that one can improve their understanding of law by comparing legal interpretation with interpretation in other fields of knowledge, particularly literature. If lawyers are to benefit from a comparison between legal and literary interpretation, however, they must see the latter in a certain light, and the chapter examines what that is. Law is a political enterprise, whose general point, if it has one, lies in coordinating social and individual effort, or resolving social and individual disputes, or securing justice between citizens and between them and their government, or some combination of these. So an interpretation of anybody or division of law, like the law of accidents, must show the value of that body of law in political terms by demonstrating the best principle or policy it can be taken to serve.
