A Method of Understanding Criminal Law Texts

Abstract

Understanding a legal text is very important, because, the correct interpretation of the law is the complementary part of criminal justice system. But how can one correctly understand the meaning of the law texts? Regrettably, in Iran's legal system, there are no general legal articles for the method of understanding  all the criminal law texts. In this research, we try to suggest  a method of understanding based on the legislator`s intentions by constructing interpretative rules which combined of a set of general and special rules; the former is derived from the linguistic sciences and the latter from the legal principles. Therefore, these rules can be applied in all the legal system, and as a sample, we study them in the Iranian criminal law. As a result, as the formal interpreters, the judges should give a meaning to a legal text that is adaptable to its author`s intent, otherwise their understandings are outside the legal framework.