The One True Sense

In his Legal and Political Hermeneutics, Francis Lieber claims that "No sentence, or form of words, can have more than one 'true sense,' and this is the only one we have to inquire for." He criticizes efforts to write all possible specifications into the laws and regulations with which a legal and political hermeneutics is concerned, as if the necessity of interpretation could simply be avoided. "Men," he writes, "have at length found out that little or nothing is gained by attempting to speak with absolute clearness and endless specifications, but that human speech is clearer, the less we endeavor to supply by words and specifications that interpretation which common sense must give to human words." Moreover, he insists, legal codes are to be conceived of as living rather than dead ideas. "[C]ertain principles being established, they should be left to unfold themselves gradually, and to be expanded, modified, and limited, by the civil action of the nation itself, by the practical political intercourse of society." Still, in his view, neither of these considerations can be used to claim "that the object of interpretation can ever vary or that there can be two true meanings in any text." Instead, we are to discover the true meaning "according to rules established by reason" and trusting "at last to common sense and good faith."