Equity, adverbs, the Civil Code and legal epistemology
DOI:
10.16928/e20130204001Keywords:
Equity Interpretation Law MusicAbstract
The text addresses the open texture of the law through an examination of the adverbs used in the Brazilian Civil Code of 2002. It takes as its thread expressions such as equitably, reasonably, proportionally, considerably and conveniently, found in articles 153, 317, 402, 413, 478, 479 and 944, and shows that each of them refers to a measure that can only be defined in the circumstances of the case. It discusses the role of the interpreter and of the judge in filling those spaces, the Aristotelian notion of equity, the incompleteness of statutory law and the network metaphor proposed by Ost and van de Kerchove for legal knowledge. The exposition draws on a comparison with music and theatre — two-stage arts, in which the initial statement is completed only in performance — and on Brazilian song lyrics, and revisits the discussion of the ideal reader and the blank model. It concludes that certainty of measure is manufactured case by case and that legal epistemology must accommodate that mobility.
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