ANALISI E DIRITTO 305 2016: 305-319 Three Questions for Moderate Sceptics Raquel Barradas de Freitas* Abstract This article offers three challenges to moderate scepticism about legal in- terpretation. First, it is argued that it is possible to reject a rule-centric view of legal interpretation, without necessarily endorsing rule-scepticism. Secondly, it is suggested that a proper understanding of the distinction between what judges do as legal interpreters and what they do as legal officials, would help theorists to develop a better account of legal interpretation. Thirdly, it is submitted that, when understood as something said (and not as an act of stating), a statement can be true or false. This last point challenges Guastini’s claim that interpretative statements do not have truth value. Keywords: Moderate skepticism. Legal interpretation. Judicial authority. In- terpretative statements. 1. Introduction There are many varieties of scepticism and many things about which to be sceptical. The scepticism with which this paper is concerned is a family of the- ories of law and adjudication 1 . Within this family of theories, we find different accounts of legal interpretation, often focusing on judicial reasoning and deci- * Teaching Fellow in Jurisprudence, University College London, Faculty of Laws. Lecturer in EU Law, Balliol College, Oxford, r.freitas@ucl.ac.uk. A first version of this paper was presented at the Oxford-Girona-Genoa Seminar in Legal Philosophy, on 10 April 2015, in St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. I am grateful to the organisers and to participants for their questions and comments. I would partic- ularly like to thank Gregory Messenger, Lea Raible, William Twining, and an anonymous reviewer for their many generous and insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. All mistakes are my own. 1 For a detailed genealogy of continental interpretative non-cognitivism, see Chiassoni 2016a, 2016b. In the Anglo-American world, the most radical advocates of interpretative non-cognitivism where the members of the group of scholars, formed in the 1920s and 1930s, known as American Legal Realists (Carl Llewellyn, Jerome Frank, Felix Cohen, Herman Oliphant, Walter Wheeler Cook, Un- derhill Moore, Max Radin, and Hessel Yntema). There was also a Scandinavian school of legal realism, to which A. Hagerstrom, K. Olivercrona, A. Ross, and A. V. Lundstedt belonged. Some, not all, legal realists were rule-sceptics. American Realism was mainly an anti-formalist movement which departed methodologically from mainstream modern Anglophone legal philosophy in advocating “philosophical naturalism”, avant la lettre. For a contemporary defence of legal realism, see Leiter 2007.