On the Descriptive Level of Interpretation of a Legal Text

Abstract

The aim of the article is to analyse Ryszard Sarkowicz’s theory of the levels of interpretation of a legal text. On the one hand, this theory is aptly indicated as one of the most original and valuable achievements of the Polish theory of law. On the other hand – quite paradoxically – it is extremely rarely discussed. In my article, I show one element of the tension that you can see in the description of what Sarkowicz calls the descriptive level of interpretation. It seems that sometimes this level is associated only with the external perspective, while at other times, it is associated with external and internal ones. In the following subsections, I present arguments for the second of these ideas. At the end of the article, I show a consequence of this choice. It involves transforming the concept by distinguishing an additional level of interpretation – a descriptive one, from the internal point of view.