Interpretive Justice in Organizations: A Preliminary Discussion of Problems and Open Questions

Organizations govern by rules, and rules do not apply themselves. Between a rule and a case stands an act of interpretation, performed by an organ of the organization, which fixes what the rule shall have meant for that case. This paper takes that act as its object. It argues that the interpretive act is a distinct site at which injustice can occur, irreducible to the injustice of what an organization distributes or to the injustice of the procedures by which it decides. Four questions organize the discussion: who holds standing to interpret, by what modes interpretation proceeds, which rules and which predicates carry the interpretive load, and what protects a party against whom an interpretation is exercised. The paper surveys what jurisprudence, legislative drafting, standard-setting, administrative review, and organizational governance have made of these questions, across several legal traditions, and finds a boundary common to every device assembled in answer to the fourth: each presupposes that the interpreting body holds some stake in recognition, whether legal, market, reputational, or professional, and each approaches ineffectiveness as that stake approaches zero. Where authority over interpretation and dependence upon recognition are held by the same party, no available instrument reaches the interpretive act. Against this boundary the paper sets a generative relational reading, on which an interpretation is assessed by what it does to the capacity of the relation between interpreter and interpreted party to generate a further interpretation. Injustice, on that reading, is the extinction of that capacity, and the sanction upon it is delegated to the dynamics of the structure itself, under guardrails the paper states explicitly and at length. The account supplies no enforcement and no remedy to a present party, and the paper closes on the questions this leaves open.