| Abstract [eng] |
Summary The Application of the Linguistic Interpretation Method in the Practice of the Lithuanian Supreme Court and Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania The linguistic method of law interpretation is recognized in law theory as one of the most important and widely implemented in interpreting law, for every rule of law is an embodied rule of behavior. The essence of this method lays in determining the word sense according to the context of the article or the content of the law. That is why most scholars believe the linguistic method to be the first method to be taken into account among others. The concrete linguistic interpretation rules should be preserved when implementing linguistic method of law interpretation, formulated by law theory. Only by preserving such rules, the rationality of law interpretation would be safeguarded. One faces problems implementing these rules, because the complicated implementation of the linguistic method of law interpretation is concerned with objective reasons, i.e. with the nature of the language, the ambiguity, indetermination, abstractedness of words used in the law, the use of the same word in the different context and etc. According to the analyzed practice of the Supreme Court of Lithuania and the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania, it might be concluded that the linguistic method of law interpretation does not prevail in the practice of these courts, i.e. the practice of these courts does not prove the proposition of law theory that the linguistic method of law interpretation is the method used most widely when interpreting law. The Supreme Court stated that the linguistic method of law interpretation prevails only in small number of cases and often there were given no argumentation why this method prevails in the concrete case and no justification to what concrete rules known in law theory the Supreme Court referred while getting such a result of rule of law interpretation. The Constitutional Court rarely employs the linguistic interpretation, because it gives the supreme to the systematic method of law interpretation and uses the linguistic method only as subsidiary one. |
