Samuel L. Bray Emphasizes the Importance of Context in Legal Interpretation

In a brief article titled Interpretation, Context, and "the Region Currently Under Strain", legal scholar Samuel L. Bray points to a quotation from Richard Rorty as a useful guide when interpreting legal texts.

Bray cites a quote from Rorty’s “Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation” that emphasizes the inseparability of a text or object from its context and suggests that interpretation should focus on resolving tensions within the interconnected "web" of context, rather than isolating the object. Rorty argues that all objects are inherently contextualized and come embedded within a framework, much like “Riemannian mathematics” are defined by their axioms. Thus, the task of interpretation is not to strip an object of its existing context or to search for a new, independent context, but rather to explore the broader network of related elements to address any unresolved issues within the current interpretive framework.

For legal interpretation, Bray sees the final two sentences are particularly instructive: they imply that instead of seeking an abstract, context-free meaning of a law or statute, interpreters should consider its placement within the larger legal, social, and historical web to resolve practical interpretive challenges.