Meaning Negotiation in Legal Interpretation

Meaning negotiation is a process in which the object of negotiation is the meaning of a set of terms. When this happens in the law, the object of negotiation is typically the meaning of terms occurring in one or more legal provisions relevant for the parties involved in a dispute: the parties in the interaction may typically have a common interest in achieving at least a partial agreement in regard to the interpretation of a given legal provision, although they also have conflict of interests in other respects. Parties can thus make an attempt to converge into a legal solution, which requires to agree on the same legal definitions. Negotiating the meaning of a set of legal terms basically means to propose definitions and to accept and/or to reject them. This may require parties to revise their own concepts or those that have been anyway adopted in previous steps of the process. In this chapter we will examine only some types of disagreements, which concern the coherence of the interpretation of terms occurring in legal provisions when the goals assigned to such provisions are considered.