Legal Acts and Legal Agents: Interpretive Convergence, Institutional Roles, and the Structure of Legal Practice

Author

Jeyoun Son

Published

2026-04-30

Publication and Citation

This page is an author-prepared English translation and public reading edition of the published Korean article. It is intended to be citable by readers who work primarily in English or other Latin-script languages.

English access edition: Son, Jeyoun. 2026. "Legal Acts and Legal Agents: Interpretive Convergence, Institutional Roles, and the Structure of Legal Practice." English translation and public reading edition of the Korean article. https://jeyounson.github.io/assets/publications/legal-acts-agents-en/.

Version of record: Son, Jeyoun. 2026. "법적 행위와 법적 행위자: 해석적 수렴, 제도적 역할, 그리고 법적 실천의 구조" [Legal Acts and Legal Agents: Interpretive Convergence, Institutional Roles, and the Structure of Legal Practice]. Korean Journal of Legal Philosophy 29(1): 35-87. https://doi.org/10.22286/kjlp.2026.29.1.002.

Citation to this English edition is welcome for international discussion and ordinary scholarly reference. This author-prepared English access edition is not the journal's version of record; for definitive wording, pagination, formal indexing, Korean-language legal scholarship, or page-perfect references to the journal publication, also cite the Korean version of record and DOI.

Abstract

A legal order is produced and sustained by many different actors: legislatures enact statutes, courts interpret them, administrative agencies implement them, and citizens and firms plan their conduct and assert rights by relying on legal materials. How, then, can such a dispersed practice nevertheless function as a common normative order? This article addresses that question by analyzing the internal structure of legal practice, especially the relation between legal acts, legal agents, and legal uptake-and-response. Its starting point is that legal meaning is not simply produced by a single sovereign interpreter, by the private intention of the legislature, or by a fixed institutional form. Rather, legal meaning becomes publicly available as legal reason through a process in which legislative acts, judicial decisions, administrative measures, and patterns of compliance or contestation are read, applied, distinguished, criticized, and corrected by subsequent legal actors.

The article first develops a general theory of legal acts. A legal act is a communicative act that is presented, interpreted, and responded to as legally meaningful within legal practice. For such an act to function as a stable public norm, it must satisfy three felicity constraints: Generality, Shareability, and Focal-point Stability. Generality requires that a legal act provide a projectable normative pattern for future cases. Shareability requires that its meaning and reasons be publicly intelligible and contestable within a shared legal vocabulary. Focal-point Stability requires that the act be capable of serving as a stable point of coordination for the expectations and conduct of multiple legal agents. These G–S–F conditions explain why some legislative enactments, judicial decisions, administrative measures, and practices of compliance stabilize as legal norms, while others remain peripheral or fade away.

The article then reconceptualizes legislatures, executive officials, courts, citizens, and other legal subjects as differentiated legal agents participating in interpretive convergence. It thereby challenges the orthodox division according to which “making” is the function of legislatures and “interpreting” the function of courts. On the view defended here, the separation of powers is not a practice-transcendent division between law-formation and law-interpretation, but a differentiated structure of roles, responsibilities, and mutual correction within a common legal practice. In this context, Austin’s notion of uptake is extended beyond the narrow recognition of illocutionary force into a broader structure of legal uptake-and-response, through which legal acts are applied, distinguished, criticized, limited, and corrected in subsequent practice. This does not reduce legal meaning to actual social agreement or mere acceptance by a community. Rather, the article defends a view of practice-mediated legal objectivity: the objectivity of legal meaning is formed and maintained through public reason-giving, role-bound judgment, institutional review and correction, and precedential stabilization.

The core of the article is an account of the judicial role. Courts are not institutions that reveal a final meaning of law already complete apart from legal practice. They are best understood as dispute-resolution institutions whose decisions can become law-shaping focal points only through subsequent uptake within the legal community. Judicial authority is therefore earned and mediated rather than self-authenticating. Familiar puzzles about judicial supremacy, hard cases, and so-called activism are reframed as questions about how far particular decisions satisfy the G–S–F constraints under professional norms, precedential practices, reason-giving requirements, and structures of review. This analysis reframes separation of powers, the discipline of precedent, and judicial legitimacy as matters concerning the differentiated roles, responsibilities, and mechanisms of mutual correction within legal practice. Rather than restating the foundations of interpretive convergence, the article shows how such convergence is produced and maintained through the internal architecture of legal practice.

Keywords: interpretive convergence; legal acts; legal agents; legal uptake; judicial authority

Version note. This English version is provided as a public access edition for international readers. It may be cited as the English access edition of the article; for definitive wording, pagination, or formal journal-record purposes, pair it with the Korean version of record and DOI.

* This article is a revised and developed version of a paper presented at the 2025 Fall Joint Academic Conference of the Korean Association Of Legal Philosophy and the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Law Research Institute, “Issues in Legal Theory: Academic Conference in Commemoration of Professor Hak-Tae Kim’s Retirement” (13 December 2025, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies). I am deeply grateful to Dr. Minyong Oh (The Association of Korean Law Schools), who offered helpful and careful comments as discussant at the conference, and to the anonymous reviewers, whose comments greatly helped improve this article.

I. Introduction

Legislatures enact statutes, courts interpret them, administrative agencies implement them, and citizens and firms plan their conduct and assert rights by relying on legal materials. A legal order is thus produced through the outputs and responses of many different actors. How, then, can such a dispersed practice nevertheless function as a common normative order? The question is familiar, but it is often framed in the wrong way. In a mature legal system, no single actor performs the whole practice. Yet legal systems do not ordinarily collapse into interpretive Babel. Statutes guide conduct, judgments organize expectations, precedents structure later argument, and administrative practice generates reliance. The problem, then, is not simply what makes law valid, but how scattered acts and responses are coordinated into a publicly intelligible legal order.

Two familiar pictures obscure that problem. The first is a speaker-meaning picture. On this view, legal meaning is transmitted from an authoritative institutional speaker, paradigmatically the legislature, to later interpreters. Courts succeed insofar as they recover and apply that meaning. The second is a judicial-finality picture. On this view, the legal meaning that matters is fixed by the court whose decision settles the dispute. The first picture overstates the determinacy of authoritative intention; the second overstates the self-sufficiency of adjudicative settlement. Both miss the same feature of legal practice: legal meaning is not fully constituted at a single moment of institutional production. It becomes publicly usable through subsequent uptake, response, contestation, and stabilization.

This article offers a practice-mediated account of legal meaning. Its core claim is that a legal act becomes a stable public norm only when it can be taken up and responded to by differentiated legal agents within a shared structure of reasons. Legal meaning is therefore neither private intention, nor brute social regularity, nor a practice-transcendent meaning fact waiting to be revealed by courts. It is a public object of practical reasoning stabilized through legally structured uptake-and-response.1

The article takes as its starting point the interpretive-convergence approach defended in my earlier work, where I argued that legal normativity becomes intelligible only against the background of interpretive convergence within a legal community(손제연 2025). Here the focus shifts from the existence conditions of law to the internal architecture of legal practice. The question is no longer only whether legal meaning converges, but how such convergence is produced and maintained through legal acts, legal agents, legal uptake, institutional roles, and judicial authority.

The article makes four contributions. First, it develops a theory of legal acts. Legal acts are communicative acts presented as legally meaningful and capable of being interpreted, applied, and responded to within legal practice. To function as stable public norms, they must satisfy three felicity constraints: Generality, Shareability, and Focal-point Stability. Second, it reconstructs legal agents as asymmetrically situated participants in legal meaning. Legislatures, courts, officials, and legal subjects do not possess equal authority, but all can participate in the stabilization or destabilization of legal meaning. Third, it explains the stabilization of legal meaning through legal uptake-and-response. In this broader legal sense, uptake is not limited to recognizing illocutionary force; it includes later application, distinction, criticism, limitation, correction, and reuse. Fourth, it offers an account of judicial authority as earned authority. Courts settle cases by institutional authority, but their decisions acquire wider law-shaping significance only through subsequent uptake within the legal community.

The discussion proceeds as follows. Section II defines legal acts and legal agents and introduces the G–S–F felicity constraints together with legal uptake functions. Section III formulates the tension between the practical necessity of interpretive convergence and the evident reality of interpretive divergence. In particular, it shows why both the faithful-agent model that seeks to recover legislative intent and the judicial-finality picture that attributes legal meaning to the court’s final judgment are insufficient. Section IV develops a step-by-step resolution: it first examines the limits of the speaker-meaning model, then explains how legal meaning is disciplined through roles, training, review, and precedent, and finally reconstructs the judicial agent as an office-bound mediator within that structure.

III. The Puzzle of Interpretive Convergence: Divergence, Discretion, and the Judicial Role

At first blush, one might think that ensuring a unified interpretation of the law is simply a matter of all legal agents obeying the intent of the lawmaker. For example, the faithful-agent model traditionally holds that judges are “faithful agents” of the legislature, charged with carrying out the legislature’s intent as expressed in statutes(Bruhl and Leib 2012; Ross 2013). On this naive view, convergence occurs because everyone is deferring to a single authoritative meaning, the one the legislature had in mind. If each judge asks, “What did the legislature intend here?” and each citizen asks, “What would the courts say the law means, given the statute?”, presumably all will arrive at the same answer, namely the legislature’s communicated intent.

However, on closer examination this picture begins to crack. Intention is not self-interpreting. Legislative intent (even assuming it exists and is discoverable) must itself be conveyed via language, which is subject to ambiguity and vagueness. The legislature typically speaks in general terms, applying to innumerable situations the lawmakers could not have explicitly anticipated. This leads to Hart’s famous observation that legal rules have a core of clear meaning and a penumbra of doubt due to the “open texture” of language(Hart 1994). In hard or borderline cases, for example whether an electric scooter is a “vehicle” in the park within the meaning of a city ordinance, even well-meaning interpreters might diverge. The legislature’s intent might not yield a unique answer, because the lawmakers themselves did not consider the case, or their intentions were not uniform or clear.

Moreover, the assumption that judges merely discover and apply legislative intent is complicated by the reality of judicial discretion. Hart noted that when legal materials underdetermine the outcome, a judge inevitably must exercise discretion and in effect creates “new law” to fill the gap(Hart 1994). This was a central point of contention between Hart and Dworkin: whereas Hart accepted a modest form of law-creation by judges in hard cases, Dworkin insisted that even in hard cases there is a right answer embedded in the law and thus denied true discretion(Dworkin 1977). For our purposes, the important point is that if judges sometimes go beyond mere interpretation and actually innovate, how can convergence be maintained? Would divergence not arise if different judges innovate in different directions? Even if one judge’s innovation becomes precedent, the link between what the legislature intended and what the judge pronounces as law can become attenuated.

The puzzle deepens when we consider the multi-agent aspect. Law is not a one-time message from a single speaker to a single listener; it is an ongoing chain of communications among many parties. The legislature communicates through statutes, the judiciary through judgments, administrators through regulations and orders, and so on. Citizens learn the content of law partly from the statutes and partly from how officials implement them. This iterative process resembles a game of telephone, with risks of distortion at each step, except that the legal system has checks to reduce distortion. What are those checks? And can we be sure they suffice? If even one important agent, say, a judge, interprets law in a deviant way, subsequent agents such as lower courts, officials, and the public might either follow that deviant interpretation, thus collectively drifting away from the legislature’s meaning, or conflict with it, thus losing convergence. Either outcome is problematic: the former undermines the democratic source of law, the latter undermines the consistency of the rule of law.

To state the problem more directly: what keeps legal interpretation from collapsing into Babel? This question does not assume that convergence is an external moral ideal imposed on law from the outside. Rather, it begins from the fact that legal practice already requires a certain possibility of convergence. Statutes must guide conduct, judgments must be usable as reasons in later cases, and agencies and citizens must be able to coordinate action and expectation around legal materials. If the same statute were taken by courts, agencies, and citizens to bear utterly incompatible meanings, with no common structure of reasons capable of mediating those differences, it would fail to function as a common norm. Interpretive convergence is therefore not an independent moral ideal, but a practical requirement that arises once legal acts are to function as reasons within legal practice.

Philosophers of language have long wrestled with a related question: if any present use of a rule can be interpreted in indefinitely many ways, how do we manage to say that we all follow the same rule of word use? Wittgenstein’s reflections on rule-following challenge the thought that a rule, by itself, already determines all correct applications in advance(Wittgenstein 1953; Kripke 1982). On Kripke’s skeptical reading, no private, mind-bound fact determines what one ought to do next in following a rule, and correctness in rule application cannot be understood apart from communal practice(Kripke 1982; Miller and Sultanescu 2022). The lesson for law is not that there are no facts about legal meaning. It is more limited: the meaning of statutes and precedents is not completed inside the private judgment of an individual judge, but becomes publicly assessable and capable of functioning as legal reason only within shared interpretive practices, forms of reason-giving, professional training, and institutions of review and correction. The solution is not to find secret instructions inside an individual mind, but to examine how legal actors are trained and constrained to continue judging and responding within the same legal problem-space.

This conclusion must nonetheless be handled carefully. The article does not simply import Kripke’s skeptical solution into jurisprudence wholesale.(Kripke 1982) Kripke’s discussion is used here as a challenge that reveals the limits of explanations that fix legal meaning in the private intention or internal judgment of a legislator or judge. But the position defended in this article is neither meaning-irrealism nor mere social-consensus theory. The objectivity of legal meaning is formed and maintained in a practice-mediated way through shared interpretive practices, public reason-giving, role-bound judgment, and structures of review and correction.9

At this point one might object that legal convergence is illusory. Judges and officials do disagree sharply; constitutional courts split, appellate courts divide, and legal controversies persist. But the existence of disagreement does not by itself show the absence of convergence. What matters is not whether every actor always reaches the same conclusion, but how disagreement is expressed and processed. If disagreement unfolds within a shared legal vocabulary, accepted forms of argument, and structures of reason-giving, review, and correction, then it need not dissolve legal practice. It may instead form part of the process by which legal meaning is clarified, stabilized, and rendered usable in later practice.

The legal system’s actual operation makes the point vivid. Even where disagreement persists at the margins, practical agreement exists across an overwhelming range of legal questions, and legal institutions contain devices for handling the disagreements that do arise. Appellate review, en banc reconsideration, standards for overruling precedent, legislative clarification, and scholarly and professional criticism all work to keep disagreement from being left as mere fragmentation. The fact that judges issue reasoned opinions and cite legal sources matters too. It shows that legal interpretation is not mere private preference, but an argumentative practice answerable to shared standards under which some interpretations can be criticized as worse and others defended as better.

The article therefore does not presuppose the strong thesis that every hard case has a single pre-existing right answer. Nor does it reduce legal meaning to actual majority agreement or to brute power relations. What matters, rather, is that participants in legal practice present their interpretations as legal reasons within shared standards, respond to criticism, and undergo processes of review and correction. The possibility of convergence is carried by that practical structure. The puzzle, then, is not “Is there exactly one right answer?” The deeper question is how legal actors continue to judge within the same legal problem-space even amid disagreement, and what institutional devices return disagreement to a public structure of reasons. That problem appears most sharply in the role of the judicial agent, which seems at once to sustain convergence and to generate the greatest risk of divergence.

The judicial puzzle can now be stated more precisely. Judges appear to be the paradigmatic interpreters, the institutional voices that say what the law is in particular cases. When things go well, they seem to be the glue of interpretive convergence: they resolve ambiguity and secure consistent application. Yet judges also stand at the center of possible divergence. An unusually adventurous judge can introduce a new interpretation that, if left uncontrolled, may spread through the system. Many lawyers and scholars fear precisely this possibility: that judges may, under the guise of interpretation, effectively rewrite the law, thereby threatening both convergence and democratic legitimacy. This fear often generates two opposing misreadings of the present theory. One is that it naively assumes judges will always follow legislative intent. The other is that it grants judges so much discretion that “convergence” becomes nothing more than whatever judges say it is. Both readings misconceive the judicial role defended here. The real task is to explain how judges can remain independent in judgment and yet still be constrained toward convergence.

Summarized at the highest level, we face a many-sided problem. Legal communication is subject to the general indeterminacies of language and the special underdeterminacies of legal texts. Law is produced, interpreted, administered, and complied with by different agents, so the meaning and effect of legal materials cannot be stabilized by the intention of one actor or the output of one institution alone. And judges require some freedom to interpret law and apply it to changing circumstances, even though that very freedom can make them look like sources of divergence. The question, then, is not where fully completed legal meaning exists in advance. It is how responses by differently situated legal actors can nevertheless be coordinated within public structures of reason and stabilized into repeatable standards. The next section addresses that problem in three steps: first by examining the limits of the speaker-meaning model, next by explaining how public legal meaning is disciplined through roles, training, review, and precedent, and finally by reconstructing the judicial agent as an office-bound mediator within that larger structure.

IV. Step-by-Step Resolution: From Individual Intent to Practice-Mediated Uptake

1. Communication in Law: Beyond the Speaker-Meaning Model

A natural starting point is to compare legal communication to ordinary communication between a speaker and a listener. Paul Grice’s account of meaning suggests that successful communication occurs when the speaker intends to convey a certain meaning and intends the listener to recognize that intention, and the listener does so recognize it(Grice 1957, 1989). One might analogize: the legislature is the “speaker” whose meaning is the law’s content, and judges (or other officials) are the “listeners” who must grasp that intended content. If every judge correctly infers the legislature’s intent, interpretive convergence is achieved as the result of the intended design: the judges’ uptake matches the legislature’s communicative intent.

However, this speaker-meaning model in its naive form proves inadequate for law. Unlike ordinary conversations, the participants in legal communication are not equals conversing in real time with immediate feedback. The legislature typically cannot directly correct a misunderstanding by a judge in the way a speaker can immediately clarify a listener’s confusion. There is a temporal and contextual gap: laws are enacted at one time by one group of people and later applied by entirely different people to situations the drafters never saw. The Gricean mechanism of meaning, speaker intention and audience recognition of that intention, strains under these conditions. First, legislative bodies do not have unitary minds; attributing a single intention to a multi-member body is fraught. Is it the intent of the median voter, the compromise everyone could live with, or an abstract “objective” intent? Second, even if we posit an objective intent, the audience of the law is diffuse and deferred. Judges and officials belong to a professional interpretive community that follows certain conventions, such as “plain meaning” rules and canons of construction, and those practices mediate how they seek intent. This means that what judges recognize is not raw psychological intent, but intent as filtered through those practices. In essence, the communicative chain is mediated by publicly accessible meaning, that is, by the text of the law and the legal practices through which that text is interpreted.

Thus, we move from a simple Gricean picture to a more public semantic picture: the content of a legal act is determined not solely by a speaker’s will, but by how that act can be reasonably understood within shared linguistic and legal conventions at the time of uptake. On this view, meaning is not simply fixed at the moment of authorship; it becomes publicly usable and stabilized through the way the act is taken up, contested, and sustained within the community’s shared interpretive standards. This tracks the familiar distinction between speaker’s meaning and utterance (or sentence) meaning(Grice 1989). A legislature may pursue a certain goal and choose words to further that goal, but the meaning of the statute it enacts is to a large extent fixed by the conventional semantics of those words and by technical legal usage as understood in the legal community. Legislatures typically intend to be bound by such conventions: they aim to communicate publicly, not in a private code. When they fail, for example by using obscure or idiosyncratic language, intention may fail to become law. Within the G–S–F framework, these linguistic competencies fall principally under Shareability and, insofar as drafting frames a rule rather than a one-off decree, under Generality as well. Hopelessly vague or internally contradictory laws frustrate convergence for precisely that reason.

But if the earlier discussion of coordination and convention helps explain stability in legal practice, another point must be added here. What matters is not merely that actors move in the same direction. Legal convergence depends on their capacity to present their interpretations and responses as public legal reasons and to criticize one another’s reasons in turn.

In that sense, “public” does not mean merely that many people happen to think the same thing. It means that legal meaning is articulated within a public space of reasons: it can be offered, used inferentially, exposed to counterargument and distinction, and made to organize later responsibility and authority. In this respect, the account defended here is closer to an institutional inferentialism than to simple social constructivism.10 The meaning of a legal act is not fixed only by what it represents. It is also publicly grasped through what claims it makes available, what distinctions it permits, what responsibilities it generates, and what later decisions it justifies or constrains. The meaning of a judgment, for example, lies not only in its bottom-line outcome, but also in the legal reasons it endorses, the doctrine it generalizes, and the exceptions and objections it leaves open. Legal meaning becomes usable and stabilized in these inferential and institutional roles.

One might ask: if the law’s meaning is essentially public, do we even need to talk about legislative intent at all? Some theorists, especially textualists, argue that interpretation should focus on the meaning of the text as understood by a reasonable reader at the time of enactment, while disregarding subjective intent. Others argue that intent or purpose plays a guiding role, especially when texts are ambiguous. The present theory can accommodate both positions to a degree by recognizing a hierarchy of interpretive sources. Text and conventional usage provide the first cut, that is, the publicly available content; evidence of purpose or intent may resolve remaining ambiguity. For convergence, however, the decisive point is that whatever interpretive strategy is used, it must be shared among interpreters. If half the judges in a system are strict textualists and the other half purposivists, systematic divergence may result. A legal system can tolerate some methodological diversity, but stable convergence usually requires a dominant or at least coordinated approach in practice. One way this is achieved is through methodological conventions: judges are trained to interpret statutes in roughly similar ways, using accepted canons and precedent, and those conventions help synchronize uptake functions.

At this point, then, we have gone beyond a purely individualistic model by showing how legal meaning becomes publicly usable as legal reason. But that is still not enough. If legal meaning is to operate as public reason, there must also be institutional structures through which reasons are presented, reviewed, and corrected. Judges stand at the center of those structures, even as they appear to possess the discretion most likely to disrupt convergence. We therefore need to consider the institutional context and feedback mechanisms that surround judicial interpretation.

2. Institutional Roles and the Discipline of Convergence

The conclusion of the previous section was that legal meaning must become usable within a public space of reasons. But public reason does not operate by itself in an abstract space. It is institutionally formed by who speaks from what position, under what procedure reasons are given, and to what forms of review and correction those reasons are exposed. What is needed at this stage is an account of the structures of role, training, review, and precedent that sustain the public character of legal meaning.

Every legal agent operates under role-structured and practice-structuring constraints that direct interpretive outputs in certain ways and impose answerability to others. These constraints are not abstract normative commands imposed from outside legal actors, but public forms necessary for their responses to function as legal reasons. For judicial interpretation, administrative implementation, and the compliance or contestation of legal subjects to become meaningful responses within legal practice, they must be situated within roles, procedures, forms of reason-giving, and possibilities of review. In that sense, “institutional” does not mean that meaning arises only inside already completed institutions. It refers to the sedimented roles, practices, and feedback mechanisms through which interpretive uptake is stabilized over time.

For judges, those constraints include interpretive conventions, appellate review, duties of reason-giving, and the force of precedent. These work as feedback and correction mechanisms. An eccentric trial-court interpretation may be reversed on appeal; even judges at the apex of a court must sustain the support of colleagues; and when a line of interpretation becomes unworkable or sharply at odds with widely shared normative expectations, the legislature can respond by amendment or reenactment. Legal practice is therefore traversed by opportunities for uptake and response by other actors. Importantly, uptake here does not mean mere endorsement. It includes following, distinguishing, contesting, narrowing, and correcting: the various ways in which a community renders a prior act tractable as public legal reason.

The uptake-function framework can now be applied iteratively. Suppose the legislature \(L\) enacts a law \(x\). A judge \(J\) interprets it as \(y = U_J(x)\) and applies \(y\) in adjudication. That judicial application then becomes the object of further uptake by other actors. Higher courts may cite it, reverse it, or distinguish it; administrative agencies and prosecutors may adjust enforcement to \(y\) or create conflicts that prompt clarification. If the legislature strongly resists the trajectory generated by \(y\), it may enact an amendment or reenact the law as \(x^{\prime}\) in order to move later uptake in effect toward some \(z\), for example by designing it so that, under dominant interpretive methods, \(U_J(x^{\prime}) \approx z\). This does not guarantee convergence to a single equilibrium in the economist’s sense. More realistically, the system tends to settle into locally stable focal points: interpretive patterns produced when further rounds of uptake and feedback no longer generate significant change under existing professional norms, precedential practices, and review structures. Interpretive convergence in this sense does not mean merely that several actors have reached the same conclusion. It means that coordinated uptake across agents and over time produces a publicly shareable understanding robust enough to guide future conduct without renegotiating the same meaning from the beginning each time.

The socialization and training of legal agents matter just as much. The central lesson of the rule-following debate for jurisprudence is that the correctness of rule application is not completed inside each actor’s private psychological state(Wittgenstein 1953; Kripke 1982). But this does not mean that actual agreement within a community simply makes correctness. Legal training is not merely a process of habituating members to give the same responses. It is a process of learning what counts as a reason, what claims incur responsibility, and what kinds of distinction, criticism, and rebuttal are permitted. Judges and lawyers, through education and professional training, learn not only lists of rules but how to give reasons, answer objections, distinguish precedent, and justify conclusions in ways that others within the community can recognize and assess. This training makes lawyers not a mere opinion community, but a public reasoning community.11

This is why the objectivity of legal interpretation is not guaranteed by the fact of actual agreement, but by reason-giving, criticizability, and institutional corrigibility. A judge who claimed to interpret a statute by consulting a horoscope would not be excluded because such a move is logically impossible. The point is that it cannot be responsibly offered within the space of legal reasons. By contrast, legislative history, text, purpose, precedent, structural coherence, and constitutional value can compete with one another precisely because they can be advanced as reasons within legal argument. The community does not merely set the boundary of legitimacy as a brute fact; it continually reproduces that boundary through processes of reason-giving, objection, review, and correction. In this way, the objectivity of legal meaning is maintained neither by private meaning facts nor by mere social agreement, but by institutional practices of giving and asking for public reasons.

These considerations can now be reconnected to the formal structure. The G–S–F constraints are not mere thin conditions of interpretability. They are also conditions under which a legal act becomes inferentially usable within the public space of legal reasons. For an act to have legal meaning, it must not only be clear and located within known practices; it must also be sufficiently articulated that later actors can cite it, distinguish it, criticize it, and apply it as a reason. In the case of legislative acts, this means that the text must be intelligible to its legal audience in light of shared language and interpretive canons, involving S and, when rule-like form is at issue, also G. In the case of judicial acts, one condition of substantive success is that the decision be justified in a form that other members of the legal community can follow. Opinions are written not only to record outcomes, but to persuade and explain. A judgment that resolves a dispute without intelligible reasons may still terminate that dispute, yet fail in Shareability and fail to generate Focal-point Stability. As a result, legal actors may not know how to generalize or respect that judgment. In extreme cases, unexplained or opaque decisions may invite narrowing interpretation or tacit noncompliance, thereby weakening their authority.

Another institutional feature that promotes convergence is stare decisis. Precedent directly supports temporal convergence by aligning present judges with earlier interpretations unless there is strong reason to depart. It creates an expected continuity in uptake functions: absent material change, \(U_{J_{2026}}(x)\) should not differ radically from \(U_{J_{1996}}(x)\) for the same law \(x\). That continuity reduces surprise and makes coordination easier, because legal actors can better predict how legal materials are likely to be handled in the future. From the standpoint of convergence, precedent narrows the dimensions of disagreement by making later judges begin from a common interpretive baseline rather than reopening every issue from scratch.

All of these mechanisms, appellate review, legislative correction, professional training, reasoned opinions, and precedent, form part of the structure of legal practice. That structure is itself the sediment of past acts and uptake rather than a prior frame imposed from above. Collectively, these mechanisms keep interpretive outputs aligned across agents and over time. One useful analogy is error correction: even when a particular actor deviates, the structure can absorb, discipline, or correct the deviation so that the system as a whole does not lose its bearings. The claim of interpretive convergence theory is that such structural features are not incidental. They are part of what makes legal practice possible as a cooperative normative enterprise.

3. Clarifying the Judicial Agent’s Role: Authority and Obligation in Interpretation

The first two steps showed that legal meaning is not simply transmitted from private intention, but becomes usable within a public space of reasons, and that this public reason is disciplined by institutional roles and feedback structures. The remaining issue is the status of the judicial agent, who stands at the center of that structure while also seeming to generate its greatest risk of divergence. Judges are often portrayed in two opposed ways: either as subordinate agents or spokespersons who must faithfully implement legislative or enacting intention, or as independent authorities or legislators who unilaterally fix the meaning of law through their judgments. The theory of interpretive convergence developed here resolves these two extremes by reconceptualizing judges as mediating agents. Judges mediate between law on the books and law in operation, and their core office-bound role is to contribute to maintaining law as a coherent and publicly intelligible system that can be reliably taken up by others.

Questions about what grounds and explains legal facts such as legal rights, duties, powers, and the effect of judgments are unavoidable theoretical questions in jurisprudence. This article, however, rejects the specific picture on which legal meaning already exists in completed form apart from legal practice and is then finally discovered or revealed by courts. We may call that picture practice-transcendent meaning realism or a judicial revelatory model. Against it, the present account holds that legal meaning and authority are formed and sustained through public reason-giving, role-bound judgment, later uptake, precedent, review, and institutional correction. This does not reduce legal meaning to whatever social reaction happens to occur. But it also does not appeal to a completed meaning fact existing prior to legal practice. It defends, instead, the view that the objectivity of legal meaning is formed and maintained in a practice-mediated way within public legal practice.

On this view, judicial authority does not have priority in determining the final meaning of law in advance of legal practice as a whole. A judgment may have immediate institutional force in the case before the court, yet its broader law-shaping significance depends on whether it is later cited, generalized, distinguished, narrowed, criticized, and entrenched in subsequent practice. Judicial authority should therefore be understood as a form of earned authority, not as self-grounding authority. Courts are not institutions that reveal completed meaning in advance of legal practice, but dispute-resolution institutions whose outputs can become coordinating standards within the legal community through later uptake-and-response. It is accordingly more precise to speak of the judge as an office-bound interpreter. Judicial freedom is not the freedom of a private individual, but the freedom of an office constrained by role-responsibilities such as impartiality, reason-giving, fidelity to recognized legal sources, and responsiveness to review. Those responsibilities do not make adjudication mechanical. Judgment remains indispensable. But purely idiosyncratic, whimsical, or result-driven departures are excluded as failures of office-bound adjudication. In the framework developed here, the judge’s uptake function \(U_J\) is not a blank check. It is conditioned by training, shared interpretive norms, and the monitoring mechanisms described above, all of which aim at maintaining interpretive convergence and, when necessary, at responsible transition.

Misunderstanding often arises from attending to only one extreme of the spectrum. Critics worry that if judges enjoy any creative leeway, convergence is abandoned and law becomes merely “judge-made law” from case to case. The theory defended here shows why that fear is overstated. Creative leeway is limited by a commitment to convergent practice. Judges want their decisions to fit with other decisions and to be followed by others, both because of professional ethos and because ineffective decisions achieve little. In economic terms, judges internalize many of the externalities of interpretation: they know that if they stray too far, higher courts or the legislature will react, and their own reputation will suffer. On the other hand, some worry that if judges are too constrained, that is, if they are merely faithful agents, they cannot respond to new circumstances or correct injustice, making the law rigid and unresponsive. It is here that reasoned discretion becomes important. Within the bounds of plausible interpretation, judges can push law to adapt. If their adaptive interpretation genuinely resonates with social values or legal principle, it may well be accepted by other actors, such as future courts, public opinion, or even the legislature’s tacit acquiescence. In that event, convergence shifts to a new equilibrium, one perhaps not explicitly imagined by the original legislature, but still consistent with larger commitments of the legal system.

A concrete illustration helps. Consider a broadly worded statute enacted decades ago that, read literally today, would yield what seems an absurd or unjust result in changed circumstances. A judge then faces a dilemma: remain faithful to the letter and produce an unjust result (faithful agent), or adjust the interpretation to avoid the absurdity (creative legislator). Different judges may choose differently at this point, and this is precisely where interpretive divergence threatens. But notice how the institutional framework guides the resolution. There is, for example, the “absurdity doctrine,” which allows judges to depart from literal text in order to avoid outcomes the legislature could not reasonably have intended. This in effect asks judges to honor a higher-level legislative intent, namely the intent not to produce absurd results. There are also techniques that interpret statutes in light of constitutional values or applicable international norms. If Judge A departs from the text to avoid absurdity while Judge B adheres to the text strictly, an appellate court may intervene and endorse one approach as legitimate. If it accepts the absurdity-avoiding interpretation, it will also try to connect that interpretation to convergent practice. It may reason, for example, that no reasonable lawmaker would have intended this outcome, and that although the interpretation is not the most literal one, it better honors the statute’s purpose and the rationality of the legal system. If instead the court sticks to the text, it may send a different signal to the legislature: “We, as judges, are constrained by the enacted language. If the result of that constraint is bad, you, the legislature, must change the law.” Either way, there is a dialogue. Judges and legislatures maintain a coherent legal order through mutual adjustment. Convergence does not mean static identity. It can include a process of coordinated evolution. What matters here is not that the court reconstructs the actual legislature’s psychological intention, but that the interpretive method of avoiding absurd results provides a reason structure that can be publicly offered in relation to statutory text, the rationality of the legal system, institutional role allocation, and the possibility of later legislative correction.

An important upshot is that the judicial role is inherently interstitial and interactive. Judges stand between law on the books and the practical outcomes of adjudication, and their fidelity is dual: on the one hand to recognized legal sources such as statutes and precedent, and on the other to law’s aspiration to justice and reason. This dual fidelity prevents both total interpretive divergence and mindless formalism. In one sense, judges are translators. They translate legally available materials, statutes, precedents, and other recognized sources, into the concrete context of particular cases. Good translation requires both fidelity to the source text and making sense within the target language12. If a translation is not acceptable to the target audience, it fails; if it betrays the source, it fails. Judges strive to avoid both failures. The best judgments are precisely those that respect law’s text and purpose while also sounding persuasive in context. Those judgments draw convergence from other actors and allow everyone to say, “yes, this is acceptable as what law should be.”

We can now dispel the misunderstanding that judicial independence and interpretive convergence are at odds. On the contrary, properly understood judicial independence is a component of convergence. A judge independent from improper influences such as political pressure or personal interest is more likely to adhere to the legal reasons and shared interpretive principles that others recognize as legitimate. When judges are impartial and coherent, they strengthen convergence through interpretations based on common legal reasons rather than eccentric or partisan bias. If judges made outcomes vary based on electoral or personal considerations, impartiality would be threatened and the law’s consistency undermined. Thus, maintaining a judiciary insulated from certain pressures is precisely aimed at keeping interpretive practice convergent on legal merits(Ross 2013).

Finally, let us consider the extreme case: what if an entire judiciary starts deviating in some direction that the rest of the legal system or society cannot accept? For instance, suppose courts uniformly adopt a very peculiar interpretation of a statute that thwarts its obvious purpose. Here, the ultimate backstop of convergence comes into play: the legislative corrective. In a constitutional, democratic system, the legislature, or the people through constitutional amendment, may be said to have the last word over legal norms. They can clarify or rewrite the law to re-establish the intended interpretation. The existence of this power exerts a subtle but real influence on judges: knowing that a gross misreading could be overturned by legislation and perhaps embarrass the judiciary, judges have reason to stay within plausible bounds. Conversely, if the political branches acquiesce to the judiciary’s reading, that acquiescence functions as a kind of ratification, integrating the judiciary’s interpretation into effective law. Over time it becomes part of the convergent practice, as everyone adjusts their understanding to it.

In conclusion of this step-by-step resolution, once our attention shifts from isolated acts of intention or meaning to the practice-mediated structure of legal uptake, the specter of interpretive anarchy largely recedes. Judicial interpretation no longer appears as a rogue source of divergence, but as one phase within a wider communicative process in which legislatures, courts, executive officials, and legal subjects mutually shape, contest, and stabilize one another’s interpretations. The judicial agent thus appears not as a privileged institution that determines a completed meaning prior to legal practice, but as an office-bound mediator that helps keep legal practice publicly intelligible and normatively coherent. Interpretive convergence is sustained through the interplay of act-level G–S–F felicity constraints, shared social and methodological conventions, and institutionally structured forms of uptake, response, and review. Deviations are neither impossible nor fatal. They can be contested, corrected, and in some cases absorbed into convergence through reason-giving, precedent, appellate supervision, legislative response, and professional criticism. The result is not static unanimity, but a self-correcting communicative order in which legal meaning is stabilized over time through coordinated uptake across agents. The puzzle of convergence is not solved by identifying a single sovereign interpreter, but by showing how the structure of legal practice, as the sediment of past acts and uptake, continually generates and maintains publicly shareable focal points of legal understanding.

V. Conclusion

This article began from a single puzzle: how can a legal order remain publicly intelligible and normatively coherent when it is produced, interpreted, and applied by multiple agents occupying different roles? The answer, I have argued, lies neither in the fiction of a single sovereign speaker whose meaning is simply transmitted through the system nor in a skeptical image of unconstrained interpretive pluralism. A legal order holds together when legal acts are taken up, contested, generalized, and relied upon within shared interpretive standards. That unity is not the output of an isolated author, but the product of practice-mediated uptake-and-response by later actors.

From that starting point, the article advanced two central claims. First, legal acts are best understood as communicative acts that can function as stable public norms only when they satisfy the felicity constraints of Generality, Shareability, and Focal-point Stability. These constraints explain why some enactments, judgments, administrative measures, and patterns of compliance stabilize as working norms while others remain peripheral or fade. Second, legal agents are not divided into wholly separate spheres of making and interpreting. Legislatures, executive officials, courts, and legal subjects all participate, differently and unevenly, in the stabilization and coordination of legal meaning through their respective forms of uptake, and thus in the broader process of law-formation. The separation of powers therefore appears not as a practice-transcendent partition, but as a differentiated structure of roles, responsibilities, and mutual correction within a common legal practice.

This reframing clarifies the judicial role. Courts are not institutions that reveal a final legal meaning already complete apart from practice. They are dispute-resolution institutions whose decisions can become law-shaping focal points only through later uptake within the legal community. Judicial authority is therefore earned and mediated rather than self-grounding. Properly understood, judicial independence is not a threat to convergence but one of its conditions, because it helps keep judicial reasons answerable to common legal standards rather than to partisan will or private preference. At the same time, reason-giving, precedent, appellate review, legislative response, and professional criticism keep judicial innovation from dissolving into fragmentation.

The larger picture is not one of static unanimity but of a self-correcting communicative order. The structure of legal practice is itself the sediment of past acts and uptake, not a framework imposed from above. Legal meaning remains common not because all participants think alike, but because disagreement is channeled into publicly shareable forms that can be criticized, revised, and stabilized into focal points of understanding. This is not a reduction of legal meaning to actual social agreement. It is a claim about practice-mediated legal objectivity: legal meaning is formed and maintained through public reason-giving and institutional response. On this view, interpretive convergence is not a mysterious background assumption of jurisprudence. It is the ongoing achievement through which law becomes, and remains, a common normative practice.

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Footnotes

  1. “Uptake” in this article refers to the concept associated with J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory(Austin 1962). In Austin’s narrower sense, uptake concerns the condition under which an illocutionary act is understood by an audience as that act. The present article extends that concept into a structure of legal uptake-and-response that includes the later application, distinction, criticism, limitation, correction, and generalization of legal acts. See Section II.3 below for the fuller account.↩︎

  2. This account is indebted to, but distinct from, conventionalist and coordination-based approaches to law. Lewis analyzes convention as a self-sustaining regularity in recurring coordination problems(Lewis 1969), and Postema develops a coordination-and-convention account of law(Postema 1982). The present theory shifts the focus from convention or equilibrium as such to the felicity of legal acts and to the differentiated uptake of legal agents.↩︎

  3. This requirement has an obvious affinity with Fuller’s principle of generality and with Raz’s insistence that law guide through general rules. The claim here is, however, recast at the level of legal acts: “generality” refers to the projectability of an act’s content—whether as rule, principle, or ratio—into later interpretation and action. (Fuller 1969; Raz 1979)↩︎

  4. Shareability overlaps with, but is not exhausted by, publicity or promulgation. Fuller treats publicity and intelligibility as central to legality; Raz likewise stresses that law must be open and clear; and Waldron highlights the public and procedural dimensions in which legal reasons must be stated, contested, and answered. The present condition adds that what must be shareable is not only the text but also the reasons advanced for it within a common legal vocabulary. (Fuller 1969; Raz 1979; Waldron 2011)↩︎

  5. The focal-point element of this condition draws on a broader literature on salience, convention, and legal coordination. Thomas C. Schelling explains that, in situations of interdependence, focal points typically enable the convergence of actors’ expectations through “prominence or conspicuousness”(Schelling 1960); Lewis develops the related idea of convention as a self-sustaining regularity in recurring coordination problems(Lewis 1969). In legal theory, Postema connects law to coordination and convention(Postema 1982); McAdams argues that law can work expressively by making one outcome salient(McAdams 2000); McAdams and Nadler provide experimental support for the claim that legal rules can create focal points for compliance even apart from sanctions(McAdams and Nadler 2005, 2008); and Bystranowski, Hannikainen, and Tobia extend coordination analysis to legal interpretation(Bystranowski et al. 2025). The present claim builds on, but is not reducible to, these accounts: unlike the focal point theory of legal compliance, it treats focal-point stability as one felicity constraint on legal acts generally. Its stability component also bears an affinity to rule-of-law accounts that stress relatively stable rules, though here that thought is recast at the level of act-based uptake rather than at the level of legal systems as wholes. (Raz 1979)↩︎

  6. “Misfire” is used here in Austin’s technical sense for cases in which the relevant performative procedure is not properly invoked or executed, so that the purported act is “void or without effect.” “Socially inert,” by contrast, is not Austin’s term but an extension used here to describe acts that, even if formally recognizable, fail to stabilize as law within an interpretive community. (Austin 1962)↩︎

  7. Although the G–S–F triad is presented here as an original reconstruction, it stands near a familiar line of thought in legality and rule-of-law theory. Fuller foregrounds generality, publicity, and clarity as central features of legality, while Raz emphasizes that the rule of law requires general, open, clear, and relatively stable rules. The present theory does not simply restate those ideas at the level of legal systems as a whole; it reworks them as felicity constraints on legal acts and on uptake within legal practice. (Fuller 1969; Raz 1979)↩︎

  8. Austin regarded the performance of an illocutionary act as closely connected with the effect that the utterance’s meaning and force are understood by the audience, that is, with “securing uptake”(Austin 1962). In this sense, Austinian uptake concerns in the first instance the conditions for the performance of an illocutionary act. Post-Austinian discussion, however, shows that the concept is not merely a matter of psychological recognition or factual understanding. P. F. Strawson reconstructs the performance of illocutionary acts through the relation between speaker intention and audience recognition(Strawson 1964), and Marina Sbisà treats uptake as a marker of illocutionary force while analyzing how it is connected with the conventional effects of illocutionary acts(Sbisà 2009). Recent discussion likewise treats uptake not as a peripheral element of speech acts but as an independent problem concerning the performance and force of illocutionary acts(Lara 2024). The present article does not adopt this entire discussion as a general theory of speech acts. It imports only one limited insight into jurisprudence: for an act to function as a legal act, it must not merely be produced or announced, but must be taken up by relevant actors as a legal act of a certain kind and processed in later practice.↩︎

  9. If Kripke’s discussion reveals the limits of explanations that rely on private meaning facts, John McDowell offers an anti-skeptical route that understands rule-following and the objectivity of meaning within communal practice without reducing them to mere social agreement(McDowell 1984). Robert B. Brandom’s inferentialism likewise understands meaning not as an isolated representational relation, but as an inferential role within normative practices of giving and asking for reasons, and in this respect it connects with the way this article explains legal meaning through public reason-giving, responsibility, answerability to objections, and institutional correction(Brandom 1994, 2000). The article does not adopt these views wholesale at the level of general semantics, but uses them as a limited jurisprudential reconstruction for clarifying the structure of legal acts and judicial authority.↩︎

  10. The phrase “institutional inferentialism” does not mean that Brandom’s inferentialism is simply applied wholesale to legal theory. The more limited point is that, just as Brandom understands meaning through inferential roles within normative practices of giving and asking for reasons, the present article has an affinity with that problematic insofar as it understands legal meaning through what claims, distinctions, responsibilities, and possibilities of objection a legal act opens up(Brandom 1994, 2000).↩︎

  11. What matters here is not a community of bare agreement, but a public reasoning community in which participants give and ask for reasons, attribute responsibility, and answer objections. This emphasis resonates with McDowell’s attempt to avoid reducing objectivity to mere social agreement, and with Brandom’s inferential emphasis on normative roles within reason-giving practice(McDowell 1984; Brandom 1994, 2000).↩︎

  12. Here, the target “language” is the concrete facts and social context.↩︎