On Interpretivism and Formalism in Sports Officiating: From General to Particular Jurisprudence

By what standards can rules, norms, and practices of sport be meaningfully or appropriately evaluated? Naturally, such rules and practices can be evaluated by reference to general—i.e., “external”—moral or other normative standards. Similarly, the practices of a given sport can be evaluated by reference to that sport’s own rules. But do sports furnish standards, principles, or values, not contained within or reducible to their formal rules, against which the sport’s rules and practices are rationally evaluable? As regular readers of this journal know, philosophers of sport have increasingly converged on an affirmative answer to this question, a position that Robert Simon dubbed “internalism.” (Simon 2000) Furthermore, many sport philosophers follow J.S. Russell (Russell 1999) in believing that Ronald Dworkin’s work in the philosophy of law (e.g., Dworkin 1986) offers the most compelling account or defense of internalism. As applied to sport, Dworkin’s theory, “interpretivism,” provides (to a first approximation) that abstract principles are part of the law governing a sport and that those principles can be determined by reflection on the values and purposes that best cohere with the institutional history of the sport and show it in its best light.