Interpretation of Wills

University Professor Kent Greenawalt of the Columbia Law School has recently published an article entitled What is Legal Interpretation?  A Pluralist Approach to Interpretation: Wills and Contracts, 42 San Diego L. Rev. 533 (2005).

Here is an excerpt from the conclusion of Prof. Greenawalt’s article:

We have seen in respect to contracts and wills that deciding just how courts should treat documents that are framed by private individuals and carry legal authority is fairly complex. Here we need not worry about the complications of having hundreds of authors or the survival of a text’s mandatory force over centuries, yet courts and scholars struggle with the right balance of subjective and objective elements, and what looks right for wills does not look exactly right for contracts. This investigation of wills and contracts can provide a helpful comparative perspective when one turns to statutory and constitutional interpretation.

We can understand the awkwardness of trying to apply the single inquiry approach to the job of courts. With wills, if a legal rule gives a definite meaning to a term, judges will assume that the term carries that meaning (at least barring overwhelming evidence that the testator meant something different). * * *

Thus, in both wills and contracts, judges often do not even resolve step one of the single-inquiry approach: what is the real meaning or meanings? If they do not resolve step one, judges also will not focus on whether to displace meaning, because they will not know if, by adopting a meaning, they will be adhering to a real meaning they have not taken the effort to discern or will be displacing the real meaning. Nothing prevents a theorist from working out all these circumlocutions, but they begin to seem like the epicycles needed to explain how the sun circles the earth. For law, the pluralist account, which acknowledges that courts consider many factors to resolve the meaning of authoritative legal texts, is vastly more straightforward.