Comparative Legal Interpretation focuses on textual interpretation of the law. All law needs to be interpreted, and there are many ways to do it. Greenawalt covers the dominant methods of legal interpretation, explaining their underlying structure and efficacy. But there are other issues involved. Which perspective should we prioritize--the writer or the reader? Should interpretation be abstract or contextual? Should it have a specific aim or a general objective? To answer these tough questions, he explores how interpretive strategies from other disciplines--the philosophy of language, literary and musical interpretation, religious interpretation, and general interpretive theory--can augment and enrich our methods of legal interpretation.

In Legal Interpretation, Kent Greenawalt focuses on the complex and multi-faceted topic of textual interpretation of the law. All law needs to be interpreted, and there are many ways to do it. He explores the ways in which interpretive strategies from other disciplines--the philosophy of language, literary and musical interpretation, religious interpretation, and general interpretive theory--can augment and enrich methods of legal interpretation. Over the course of the book, Greenawalt suggests how such forms of interpretation are analogous to legal interpretation--and points to those cases in which interpretation must rest on the distinctive aspects of legal theory, such as is the case with private documents.