ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the specifically interpretive nature of judicial decisions and thus of the common law as a whole. The predominant form through which previous judgments are encountered is language, ultimately recorded in written law reports. When a judge is faced with a case, her determination is made through the reading and application of existing law and principle—usually derived from the arguments and materials or citations presented to the court by the parties involved in the dispute. Interpreters are constrained by their tacit awareness of what is possible and not possible to do, what is and is not a reasonable thing to say, and what will and will not be heard as evidence in a given enterprise.
