Legal Meaning as a Shared Enterprise: The Judiciary-Scholarship Dynamic Through the Lens of the Social Division of Linguistic Labour

Scholarly discussions on legal interpretation often centre on methodological approaches rather than the diverse actors who contribute to shaping legal meaning. This article refocuses attention from interpretive techniques to the agents involved in meaning-making, arguing that legal interpretation is a collaborative effort among multiple contributors. Building on Hilary Putnam’s theory of the social division of linguistic labour, the paper offers a conceptual framework for understanding the distributed nature of legal interpretation. At the heart of this discussion is the interaction between legal academia and the judiciary, demonstrating how academic discourse often informs judicial decision-making, thereby reinforcing a collective enterprise in the making of legal meaning. While this study offers only an initial and illustrative account, it opens several promising avenues for future research. These include empirical inquiries into how academic arguments influence judicial reasoning, the interpretive role of legal practitioners in specialized and innovative domains, and the broader inclusion of corporate and non-institutional actors in the legal-linguistic community. Ultimately, the article argues that legal meaning should be understood not as the product of a single institutional voice, but as the outcome of a dynamic and socially distributed epistemic process.