U 5/98-III: why it is doomed from an interpretive point of view (Part 1)

U 5/98-III: why it is doomed from an interpretive point of view (part 1)

The Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) Constitutional Court decision of 1 July 2000 (U 5/98-III) attempted to demonstrate that the Dayton BiH Constitution implies a thesis on the constitutionality of all three BiH peoples throughout BiH territory, without qualification. This essay aims to demonstrate that the decision is implausible and that it rests on a flawed interpretation of the constitution.

 Suggested Reading Collaborate GCCT

By Dražen Pehar

The chief task of this essay is to assess the Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) Constitutional Court decision of 1 July 2000 (U 5/98-III), which can be reduced to an attempt to demonstrate that the Dayton BiH Constitution implies a thesis on constitutionality of all three BiH peoples throughout the BiH territory,[1] without qualification. This essay aims to demonstrate that the decision is implausible and that it rests on a flawed interpretation of the constitution.[2] Such a demonstration is presented in Part 2 of the essay. Part 1 is an important introduction to the considerations in Part 2: it addresses the issue of foundational elements that all legal interpretations need to include and offers a view of interpretation that applies to all courts including the BiH Constitutional one. Following the assessment of the U 5/98-III, which reads the decision in light of political concerns, politicization, and political ideology, as a dominant and arbitrary factor of interpretation, Section 4 of Part 2 offers a number of analogies from the legal past, the American and German jurisprudential contexts in particular, to point to the future directions in which our common perceptions (and future reinterpretations) of the U 5/98-III are highly likely to evolve.

The task of legal interpretation, in the sense of the process of interpreting of the language of legal documents including regulations, laws, and constitutions, is not especially demanding.[3] We should be up to the task simply due to our mastery of a natural language (English, Russian, Croatian….), when such mastery was gained through a sufficient level of self-reflection. The communication-related conditions marked by a lack of clarity (e.g. a rhetorical figure, allusion, an open-ended sentence, ambiguity, and similar) are relatively frequent and we encounter those already in our role of a language-learning child. This, of course, means not that the human users of language all stand on an equal level of language-related mastery or creativity. Individual variation in the matters of a creative and pertinent interpretation is a fact of life. However, as a matter of principle, it is, I think, impossible to designate some specific professional groups as guaranteed performers of successful interpretation (e.g. lawyers, judges, or university professors). Creativity in the tasks of interpretation is not limited to specific groups, ages, or even individuals.

The above claims should serve primarily a single purpose: to protect us to a sufficient degree from legal elitism which is frequently advocated in relation to the issues of legal interpretation. In other words, as the interpreters of a legal document, we must not succumb to the following claims that attempt to smuggle in our conversational arguments the illusion of legal certainty and irrefutability: “lawyers must know more about the subject,” or “judges tend to accumulate such an amount of interpretive experience that it makes no sense to argue against them in the matters of legal interpretation.” All such claims are instances of a legal quasi-wisdom that normally tries to shield some dogma from critical questioning and counter-arguments; we stand always under the commitment of assessing all legal propositions, including interpretive ones, in light of the generally applicable epistemological and logical-semantic standards. Additionally, all legislators are duty-bound to adhere to a principle that indicates a very inimical attitude to the legal elitism in the matters of legal interpretation: laws must be written in a language that is clear and understandable to all citizens. You must not indict someone on the basis of a code of law that is not understandable to him or her. Hence, the same proposition must apply to the issue of interpretation.

That is why legal interpretation must be fundamentally open and accessible to all those concerned with it in any way, and that is why legal interpretation must be maximally ‘liberal’ and open to all viable criticism and counter-arguments. However, we need to have in mind that the language-related considerations are not exclusive ones: legal interpretation must be open to a legitimate input by anyone also because it is so inextricably tied to political and, more importantly, ethical theories and considerations. Law stands in close relations with the issues of morality and politics, hence also with general anthropological themes and concerns. As such theories, considerations, themes and concerns are of general interest to everyone, it would be both meaningless and counterproductive to pose the claim that, on the issues related to law, some legal and properly schooled experts are the only ones capable of passing a reasonable judgment. One should, for instance, keep in mind that creative writers were able to present, and propose solution to, some moral dilemmas that characterize our common ethical and legal practice, hence cannot be excluded in their role of moral, and therefore legal, experts and road-paving authorities.

After we discard legal elitism in the matters of interpretation, we should say a few important words about the very process of interpreting both of general and legal nature. First and foremost, in this essay one kind of interpreting will not be of concern to us: it is the kind of interpretation we commonly relate to the notion of ‘the reading of poetry.’ Sometimes, the goal of interpretation, as sanctioned by a certain context, is not to establish a single and to all binding meaning or to construct a key and primary meaning of a document. Sometimes the process of interpreting aims at enlarging the space of interpretation, not narrowing it as it should be, or at multiplying the meanings, not reducing them to a true one. One should also have in mind that some poets relate to their own poetry as if it is a means of infinite multiplication of meanings. And they relate to their interpreters as if the latter should serve as partners in creation of ever richer and increasingly complex poetry. Have in mind John Lennon and his “I am the walrus.”

As Pelikan emphasized,[4] legal interpretation is of a different kind; it is like the interpretation of the Bible. In the case of interpretation as a legal task, the interpreter deems his interpretation to be a rational process guided by a single goal: to establish an actual meaning of a text that is taken as authoritative and binding on all the readers of the document, of the Bible or a constitution. In such a context, the outcome of interpretation is offered to those who feel that they are bound by the document, by the believers or the citizens who adhere to a single constitution. This then means that the process of interpreting in this context is actually closest to the process of interpreting as we found it in the cases of the quotidian communication and interpretation – whenever we interpret the utterances of our interlocutor, we assume that they carry a single and specific meaning, and we also assume that the interlocutor should be the key authority in establishing what s/he intended, or meant, to say. Of course, in the case of the Bible and the constitutions, we cannot rely on a single interlocutor as a primary authority; normally, a group or a collective person is a proper author of that kind of document. Hence, often the proper meaning must be determined by the means of negotiation between the actors who play the role of various original drafters/writers of the documents.

Now, assuming such premises, what is the process of interpretation, and what are its essential components? Let us take a simple example: in a text we read the sentence “John is chasing a dog with a stick.” As it stands, the sentence is ambiguous. Following the reading, we may envisage John as he carries a stick and runs after a dog; or, we may envisage John as running after a dog which holds a stick in its mouth. Of course, the use of comma-sign does help with such cases of the lack of clarity, but in many languages such signs are not used, and in some situations even such signs will not be of help. For a moment, let us imagine that the sentence is written as I did it, and that the reading of it issues in a vagary: it’s not clear how we should strictly interpret the string of marks. This already tells us something important about the process of interpreting. The process is motivated by a need, by one’s encounter with an unclear condition. The need to interpret is not omnipresent, or perennially sensed, and if such a need were pressing on us all the time, it is very unlikely that we would be in position to formulate any interpretation since we would be in dark on everything all the time.[5] Hence, the conditions that are problematic meaning-wise do not emerge everywhere and always; in fact they emerge with such a low frequency that we can, in a majority of cases, draw on the fund of non-problematic information, beliefs, meanings….on the basis of which we construct a meaning.

Let us return now to the simple example. What does its interpretation amount to? It amounts to the fact that, after our confrontation with the problem, we seek some additional information that could help us form a clear view of the meaning of the given sentence. In other words, we proceed as those who work on a puzzle: we search for some additional pieces that could fill the image which presently remains incomplete. The most important demand on us is as follows: the information gathered must be sufficiently safe and reliable, and also cohere with the rest of the image, for which the primary condition is in the relevance of the information to the given image. As to our specific example, this means that we will be seeking some additional information on John and his dog. Where do we find such information? We find it wherever we think we should search for it, and normally we will search for it in three key blocks that I tend to designate as ‘indices of interpretation’ (like ‘Index of names/subjects’ in a book): context, intention, and ordinary/conventional meaning of the word.

For instance, we will try to gather the preceding parts of the text (of which the sentence on John and his dog is a part), and what it claimed there about the dog or John. In this case we will draw on the context and search for the data relevant for the understanding of both John’s intentions and the author’s intentions. For instance, if the text has already read that John was eager to punish the dog, this could mean that John, not the dog, carries the stick. And, if it has already read that the dog somehow got hold of the stick, then the interpretation could deliver a different result. For the purpose of interpreting the context should be considered in the widest possible sense: it includes the text within which the sentence is expressed, but it also includes all the parts of the world that are relevant to the said sentence. Secondly, intention should be here taken as the intention of the author of the sentence – what did the author intend to do with the said sentence. Of course, again we will need some glimpse into the context to answer the question of intentions. Thirdly, and lastly, we need to deal with ‘conventional meanings’ – this is an assumption of common sense: whenever we interpret, conventional meanings are those that should cross our minds first. This, of course, does not imply that unconventional use of words or sentences is forbidden; but for such a use, and for the interpretive hypothesis of such a use, we need some special additional reasons.

I will now present an example to demonstrate the extent to which our information on the very author of a pattern of language can critically influence our interpretation of the pattern. There is one idiom in the English language: “I have butterflies in my stomach.” Every normal speaker of the English, whenever s/he uses the sentence, intends to convey to us that s/he feels some tremor in his or her stomach due to her, or his, state of a slight nervousness or excitation. In other words, the use of such an idiom implies only that the speaker is slightly nervous. It does not imply the belief that butterflies fly within the speaker’s stomach, or are about to fly out of the speaker’s mouth. This also means that, at least in this idiom, the word ‘butterflies’ is used unconventionally, as a picture, simile or metaphor.

However, let us now change radically our assumptions. Imagine that we deal with a psychotic speaker who means the idiom literally. S/he really believes that s/he has got butterflies in her or his stomach. In other words, imagine that the speaker means the sentence literally. Also, imagine that we have good reasons to believe that the speaker means it literally, not as an idiom. Our interpretation of the sentence will, under such assumptions, change radically too. Hence, the view we hold of the speaker, which includes his or her many intentions, beliefs, desires, ambitions, hopes, fears, etc., necessarily influences, or shapes, our understanding of his or her sentences and their meanings. In other words, the sentences are normally interpreted holistically – we interpret them as parts of some bigger, implicitly and tacitly held wholes (composed of beliefs and desires, roughly).

It is on many occasions that Donald Davidson illustrated pertinently the holistic nature of the process of interpretation: however, one should immediately understand that the thesis of holism involves much more than the demand that we interpret the patterns of language within their contexts; Davidson intended to emphasize the fact that, in reality, we never interpret singular or individual sentences; we always take them in clusters and treat them as, more or less complex, narratives.[6] One of the examples Davidson used is approximately as follows: “Paul said that he saw a spider in his girlfriend’s bedroom.” Whenever we interpret this sentence, we are bound to interpret tacitly many parts of Paul’s language. For instance, we cannot interpret this sentence in the usual way without attributing to Paul many additional sentences on e.g. spiders, girls, and bedrooms. Assuming that Paul means by ‘spiders’ some special parts of the engine of his automobile, we lose the capacity of interpreting the said sentence in the usual way, in its conventional meaning. Now, have in mind that this example carries another implication: as Davidson used to emphasize frequently, as the users and interpreters of language, we cannot divorce the process of the attribution of beliefs to a speaker from the process of the attribution of meanings to the same speaker. In order to interpret the speaker correctly, many sentences s/he utters must be not only understandable, but also acceptable to us: we need to share many beliefs with the speaker; in some cases where the interpretation yields a result in which the speaker’s utterances are taken as wrong or false, our interpretation of his or her beliefs must issue in an understanding that the beliefs are at least rationally motivated or acceptable in some realistic perspective. For instance, let us assume that Paul does not believe that spiders are tiny animals that normally spin web and look suspiciously. Such an assumption would prevent us from understanding the meaning of Paul’s utterance.

Additionally, and importantly, the impact of beliefs is shown not only at the level of the psychological interpretation of the speaker to whom we attribute some beliefs to give a plausible interpretation to his or her language. It is also shown in the fact that, whenever we interpret, we in fact search for some correct, safe and reliable information that can be of help to us in a certain context. In cases where we find some false information, our interpretations are false too. Hence, it is clear that, when one gives some substantial evidence in support of the thesis that our interpretation is based on erroneous beliefs, we will have to withdraw our interpretation or modify it to a significant degree.

The emphasis on the significance of the ‘belief’ factor for the process of interpreting has three key consequences. First, as a matter of principle, we cannot know in advance which beliefs are worthy of holding or accepting. We are limited on one side by our fallibility and, on the other, by our creativity. Secondly, the transformations of our belief-system are essentially unpredictable and not describable by an algorithm or through a set of unambiguous rules. This especially pertains to the process of interpretation to the extent it depends on our discovery or construction of new beliefs.[7] For instance, have in mind that traditional hermeneutics made a bold attempt to describe the process of interpretation algorithmically, through the so-called ‘canons of interpretation.’ However, all the attempts to give a more determinate meaning to the canons, or to present them in the shape of strict and precise legal regulations, failed [8].Contemporary legal hermeneutics made a similar attempt in the international arena; as a part of the process of the drafting of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which includes two principles of legal interpretation (articles 31 and 32), the International Law Commission attempted to reduce the process of legal interpretation to a number of hierarchically ordered rules that should be successively triggered to yield an unexceptionally unambiguous result. However, such an attempt failed too. Articles 31 and 32 are open to radically different interpretations; this means that, instead of reducing the ambiguities of the international treaties, they in fact reproduce such ambiguities as a part of the outcome of legal interpretation.[9] The causes of such a reproduction are found primarily in the creative character of legal interpretation, which reflects the creative nature of the process of acquisition or formulation of the beliefs relevant to the process of interpretation.

As a part of the second provision, it is important to emphasize that, due to the creativity factor, the process of interpretation should, in the sense of its epistemological dimension (Arts 31 and 32 relate explicitly only to the semantic dimension). i.e. of the method, be viewed as an abductive kind of reasoning, that is, as the so-called “inference to the best explanation:” it is a creative formation of a hypothesis that explains a relevant set of data in the clearest and simplest terms. Hence, the process of legal interpretation cannot be viewed as an inductive generalization, or as a reasoning from particular data to a statistical generalization, nor as a deductive kind of reasoning according to some deductively valid schemes of inference.[10]

Lastly, as a third consequence of the emphasis on the significance of the ‘belief’ factor for the process of legal interpretation, the debates concerning some beliefs, either political or legal or moral, are those that produce the most interesting, and the gravest, cases of an interpretation-related dilemma. Occasionally, we will find it very difficult to adjudicate between some beliefs, or, as usually said, the conflict between the beliefs will be deemed undecidable, which will then prevent us from attributing an unequivocal content to a proposition or a text. Conversely, this also means that, in the condition when we are in a position to formulate the most plausible beliefs, and demonstrate that a fund of beliefs is, under the standard epistemological norms, unequivocally superior to another fund, our interpretation is highly likely to assume a definite, unequivocal shape under the influence of the superior fund. As I pointed out elsewhere, an accurate, or adequate, interpretation has one goal only, and can be recognized only by one feature – it does not leave room open for further, justifiable and pending, disagreements concerning some further beliefs, including both explicit and implicit ones. This means that, once it arrives at the conclusion that A means X, Y, and Z, a proper and adequate interpretation cannot be put into question by inviting some further, and reasonable, disagreements between our beliefs concerning X, Y, or Z, the beliefs that only appeared to be taken for granted, or shared, during the process of interpretation. The same claim can be presented in a metaphorical way: an accurate interpretation is like an interpretation founded on some supreme, unwritten law, on ‘the law, and right, of nature’ that cannot be denied, opposed, or violated.

Aristotle was the first to propose such a view of interpretation,[11] which can also be found in Cicero who emphasized that, as a part of one’s argument in support of one’s interpretation, one needs to prove that the interpretation is “fair/honest, or useful, or necessary (honestum aut utile aut necessarium).” [12] Lon Fuller recovered such a view of interpretation in the 20th century, and stood unambiguously for the tradition of ‘natural law’ thinking. He pertinently emphasized that “those whose fate in any degree hinges on the creative act of interpretation,…as well as those who face the responsibility of the interpretation itself, must wish that it should proceed on the most secure footing that can be obtained, that it should be grounded insofar as possible in the necessities of democratic government and of human nature itself.”[13]

All the aforementioned features of the general process of interpretation have their place in the legal kind too. Hence, every legal interpretation should be viewed as a process in which we seek some additional, safe and reliable, information that can help us explain a pattern of language, a code of law or a constitution, in the most reasonable and clearest terms. Also, each legal interpretation is a creative act which to a large extent depends on the human ability to formulate relevant beliefs, and it is an act which rationalizes the pattern of language which is the target of interpretation. One should also emphasize another matter that is frequently forgotten: the act of interpretation needs to reduce, not reproduce, ambiguity, and help one draw an image which is clearer than the image which motivated the need, and thus prompted the act, of interpreting in the first place. In other words, we should not interpret an unclear message by another unclear message. Additionally, interpretation itself is geared to a construction of a narrative as a complex compound which needs to satisfy all the key epistemological standards (coherence, justification, empirical validity, parsimony).

As to legal interpretation, we should add three more aspects. First, whenever we deal with legal ambiguities, we should bear in mind that a collective agent stands behind a legal text; in other words, a legal text should be interpreted and clarified in light of collective, not individual, intentions. Secondly, our interpretation needs to assume that the law is just or that it means at least an attempt to right an injustice. This means that, if a legal interpretation promotes an unjust structure in light of the intentions of the agent who took part in the process of formulating of the law, or the constitution, this prima facie speaks against such an interpretation. It fails to explain why the agent initially considered the law, or the constitution, as both purposeful and beneficial.

The English interpretive practice recognized this notion long time ago and formulated it explicitly: whenever we seek a proper interpretation of a law, we start with the assumption that the collective agent has formulated or adopted the law in the state of need; in other words, we assume that the collective agent was faced with a problem of which there was no knowable solution at the time of the passage of law; then the law was formulated in such a state in order to find a cure for such a condition, or to resolve the said social problem. Hence, the true purpose of interpretation is to identify the cure and, once it is thus explicitly identified, to apply it to a condition when the law requires some interpretation. This means that interpretation needs to express, not deny, the cure that the law brings to a society. Here is how the Barons of the Exchequer viewed the process when they met in 1584 to consider the difficult problem of interpretation in ‘Heydon Case:’

“And it was resolved by them, that for the sure and true interpretation of all statutes in general….four things are to be discerned and considered:
1st. What was the common law before the making of the Act.
2nd. What was the mischief and defect for which the common law did not provide.
3rd. What remedy the Parliament hath resolved and appointed to cure the disease of the commonwealth.
And, 4th. The true reason of the remedy;
and then the office of all the Judges is always to make such construction as shall suppress the mischief, and advance the remedy.”[14]

Thirdly, and finally, we should bear in mind another aspect of legal interpretation with which we return to the opening lines of this essay. Every legal interpreter undertakes the commitment to offer some valid and persuasive reasons in support of his or her interpretation. Every legal interpreter is duty-bound to explain why his or her interpretation ought to be deemed epistemologically superior to some alternative interpretations, and his or her explanation must rely only on fully impersonal considerations that need to be persuasive to all the speakers of a language, or at least to those who think that they ought to adhere to a constitutional structure. Also, every legal interpreter must be in a position to explain why s/he views the alternative as flawed, and why the alternative entails some consequences that should not be accepted. Summarily, this means that the work of legal interpretation is actually a work on a theory: the interpreter makes an attempt at formulating a theory which offers an explanation of a prima facie puzzling part of the universe; a part that is contained in a proposition, or a text, by a speaker or a group of speakers.

Now, as the interpreter’s work is primarily in the field of theory, s/he must not be a priori protected from some plausible objections. Firstly, it must not be protected through a status of an institutional body. The scientists who debate an issue in the solid state physics should never claim that an institutional scientific committee has the right to decide in the case of a conflict between some competing theories. The suggestion to the contrary makes no sense. The scientists are expected to try to resolve a dispute through arguments, or to admit that the problem, at the present stage of theoretical development, should be qualified as irresolvable and open widely to competing explanations. The same holds for the domain of legal interpretation including the area of constitutional hermeneutics or constitutional theory. There is no way one can protect a constitutional court from a counterargument by defining its decisions a priori as infallible or perfect, and thus as ultimate and irrevocable. We should also firmly keep in mind that no court has ever managed to make its unjust and clearly implausible decision immune to counterargument by drawing on its own quasi-status or role as an ‘ultimate interpreter.’ And whenever a court tried to do so, the conditions were worsening considerably, and the society was witnessing the polarization much worse than it was prior to the passage of the (unjust and implausible) interpretive decision. Hence, when we address the topic of interpretation, the status of a constitutional court should be deemed provisional and conditioned: it will depend fully on the strength of its arguments, that is, on the quality of its theoretical work.

In other words, when it comes to some really hard cases of critical constitutional interpretation, the Court’s status follows its performance, not the other way around; the former does not guarantee the latter, and cannot guarantee it, primarily because every process of interpretation is guided by reasons and argument, not by personal preferences, the party or ethnic interests, or the currently prevailing ideologies or the relations of political power.xvi However, on the other hand, many a court seems to have gladly succumbed to the following challenge: to invoke the pretence of infallibility and exploit the legal interpretation as a cover for steering arbitrarily the meaning of a law in a direction which suits some dominant party.

Let us look now into the BiH Constitutional Court decision of 1 July 2000, which was in many ways a critical juncture of the developments of post-Dayton relations within the BiH.

Dražen Pehar has a PhD in politics and international relations from Keele University (SPIRE 2006), holds an assistant professorship (BiH) in the philosophy of law and in politics with sociology. Dražen is a DiploFoundation Associate, and previously served as Chief of Staff to the BiH Federation President (1996) and as a media analyst to the OHR (1999/2000). Dražen is also part of the Institute for Social and Political Research (IDPI), a member of the Global Coalition for Conflict Transformation

The second part of this essay will be published next Tuesday. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of TransConflict.

This is my English rendering of the following essay (published by Institute for social and political research, Mostar, on 9 December 2014): „Kritička ocjena interpretativnih aspekata Odluke Ustavnog suda BiH od 1. srpnja 2000. (I.)“ (http://www.idpi.ba/konstitutivnost/ accessed on 20 Sept 2016)

Footnotes

  1. This directly relates to the BiH Constitution preamble which designates ‘Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs’ (together with Others) as ‘constituent peoples’ of BiH. I think it is safe and reasonable to assume that the peoples should be deemed the key ‘constitution making actors.’ The three peoples have together, but due to their individual interests, decided to adopt a single and shared constitutional structure.
  2. Despite this, the decision is probably the most famous of the BiH Constitutional Court decisions and is held in high regard especially by the Bosniak-Moslem political elite in BiH.
  3. For more detail concerning my views of interpretation, see Pehar (2006a), (2011a), (2011b), (2014a), (2014b, chapters 6 and 7)
  4. Pelikan (2004)
  5. Hence, Vattel’s famous rule of interpretation („in claris non fit interpretatio:“ when the matters are clear, interpretation is not required) comes first.
  6. For more detail on Davidson’s views of interpretation, see Pehar (2011b, 146-147, 165-167)
  7. Already in 1857, T. Sedgwick claimed as follows: “It would seem as vain to attempt to frame positive and fixed rules of interpretation as to endeavour, in the same way, to define the method by which the mind shall draw conclusions from testimony,” as quoted by E.D. Hirsch (1967, 202).
  8. See Hirsch, ibid.
  9. This argument is elaborated in more detail in Pehar (2006b)
  10. Eco (1991), too, advocates the view of interpretation as an abductive kind of reasoning.
  11. Aristotle (1959, 1374a25-35)
  12. Cicero (1949, II xli. 119 (p. 288))
  13. Fuller (1969, 102)
  14. Fuller (1969, 82-3)
  15. For more elaborate argument in support of such a theory of the status of constitutional courts (when it comes to constitutional interpretation), see Pehar (2014a) and (2014b, chapter 7)

Bibliography

Aristotle (1959), Ars Rhetorica, ed. by W.D. Ross, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Cicero (1949), De Inventione (London, Cambridge Mass.: William Heinemann Ltd. i Harvard University Press), Latin with the English translation by H.M. Hubbell

Eco, U. (1991), The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press)

Fuller, Lon L. (1969), The Morality of Law, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press)

Hirsch, E.D. (1967), Validity in Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press)

Pehar, D. (2006a), Moralne dileme, politički sukobi, tumačenja i promjene (Daytonskog) Ustava – stajalište filozofa jezika, Status 9, pp. 127-140 (the English version here: http://www.academia.edu/1820489/Moral_dilemmas_political_conflicts_and_interpretations_of_the_Dayton_Constitution_2006_ )

_____ (2006b), International law of interpretation: an ambiguous response to ambiguity, Journal of diplomatic language III: 1 (ed. H. Bashor), see: http://www.academia.edu/852930/International_law_of_interpretation_-_an_ambiguous_response_to_ambiguity (accessed on 24 September 2016)

_____ (2011a), “Deparlamentarizacija ustavotvorstva”, Daytonske ustavne aporije, i simulakrumbosanske nacije” – svjedo anstvo o dovršetku teritorijalizacije pravnopoliti ke misli u BiH, Status 15, pp. 125-147

_____ (2011b), Diplomatic ambiguity: Language, power, law (Saarbrücken: LAP/Akademiker Verlag)

_____ (2014a) Ambiguity, ‘Leviathan’, and the question of ultimate interpreter, Prolegomena 13:1, pp. 21-44 http://hrcak.srce.hr/121954 ) (accessed on 24 September 2016)

_____ (2014b), Vladavina zakona i njeni čuvari (Rule of law and its guardians) (Mostar: „Dijalog“, HD Herceg Stjepan Kosa a, IDPI)

Pelikan, J. (2004), Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press)


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