Alex Stein (Israel Supreme Court) has posted Do Judges Know What the Law Is? Statutory Interpretation Under the Spotlight of Epistemology (59 Connecticut Law Review, forthcoming 2026) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
When judges decide cases, they are supposed to know what the law says. But do they?
This Article addresses this fundamental question by reframing statutory interpretation as an epistemological problem: Do judges genuinely know what statutes mean, or do they merely form beliefs that, at best, happen to sometimes align with the truth?
Drawing on epistemology’s “sensitivity” condition for knowledge—which requires that beliefs be both true and grounded in evidence that tracks truth—this Article demonstrates that the dominant interpretive methodologies—textualism, intentionalism, and purposivism—fail this test. Each of these methodologies prioritizes a single interpretive factor: statutory text, legislative intent, or statutory purpose. This prioritization severs the necessary connection between judicial interpretation and truth, yielding beliefs that are either false or, at best, accidentally correct. Such beliefs cannot constitute knowledge.
Using the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County as a primary example, this Article argues that judges can achieve actual knowledge of statutory meaning only through what I call the “inclusionary principle”: an interpretive method that integrates text, intent, and purpose as mutually reinforcing factors, without privileging any single factor over the others. By examining how each of those factors constrains and validates the other two, this approach enables judges to acquire actual—or, at the very least, sufficiently probable—knowledge as to what statutes say.
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