2 Jul 2025

At the VIII Lisbon Annual Meeting on Public Law, held in Lisbon, Professor Bojan Spaić served as a discussant for Pedro Moniz Lopes’s paper “A Linguistic Account of Action Specificity.” The paper examines how linguistic concepts such as specificity, referentiality, hypernymy, and hyponymy—applied to action verbs—shape the interpretation of legal norms. Lopes argues that the linguistic precision of action verbs can influence judicial discretion and the clarity of normative guidance, drawing on the work of Georg Henrik von Wright and Joseph Raz.

In his discussion, Professor Spaić emphasized the strengths of the paper, particularly its rigorous integration of linguistic theory into legal philosophy and its innovative focus on action verbs, often overlooked in legal analysis. He noted that Lopes’s distinctions between hypernymic and hyponymic actions, as well as type and token discretion, offer valuable insights for legal theory and legislative drafting.

At the same time, Professor Spaić raised critical points, including concerns about the applicability of cognitive categorization theory to legal concepts, the limits of a purely semantic account of discretion, and the need to incorporate pragmatic and normative dimensions of legal interpretation. Drawing on counterexamples such as “to discriminate” in anti-discrimination law and “reasonableness” in tort law, he argued that interpretative outcomes are often shaped less by linguistic specificity and more by normative reasoning, precedent, and institutional practice.
The discussion highlighted the value of interdisciplinary dialogue between linguistics and philosophy of law, with Lopes’s paper opening promising avenues for further exploration while also inviting debate on the limits of semantic approaches to legal interpretation.