Accepted for publication in Mortimer Sellers, Stephan Kirste, (Eds.), Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, Springer, forthcoming 2019 1 Bojan Spaić Institutional Control of Legal Interpretation 1. Ascription of meaning in contemporary legal systems According to the standard, formalist or neo-formalist view on legal interpretation officials apply legal rules or principles whose meaning is settled and uncontroversial in virtue of them being clearly worded. The common, sceptic or neo-sceptic challenge to the standard view holds that due to ubiquity of indeterminacy in legal language, the results of the ascriptions of meaning by authoritative legal interpreters are normative in character, and interpretative statements do not have truth value. On both accounts on the nature of legal interpretation, when we have an interpretative problem we defer to normative theories of interpretation to ascribe a meaning to a legal text. Most of these normative theories, be it doctrines of legal interpretation or philosophical theories of meaning, fail to account for how meaning is ascribed within a complex interpretative community framed by an institutionalized system, and consequently they fall short when trying to account for the ascription of meaning in law. The starting epistemological point of most doctrines or interpretation is epistemic individualism – the view that we are to be entirely epistemically self-reliant in the sense that we are to disregard, refuse or personally examine every reason that we were given to believe something (Zagzebski 2012:52). But the contents of interpretive utterances as well as the “material rightness” of results of interpretative act are ultimately influenced and even determined by the level of acceptability that an interpretive utterance has in a legal community (Aarnio 2011:135). Before engaging in a method of interpretation, or following any normative guideline on how to ascribe or disambiguate meaning, individuals within every interpretative community operate with “normal intellectual inertia” within “paradigms” or “quasi-paradigms of the day” (Dworkin, 1986:89). Decisions in law, along with interpretative decisions - ascriptions of meaning - are often “chosen out of habit, out of respect for the (…) practices and traditions” (Raz 2008:328). The interpretative task of adjudication starts from the