PATRICKNERHOT Since the two operations overlap each other so much, speaking about fact and interpretation in legal science separately would undoubtedly be highly artificial. To speak about fact in law already brings in the operation we call interpretation. EquaHy, to speak about interpretation is to deal with the method of identifying reality and therefore, in large part, to enter the area of the question of fact. By way of example, Bemard Jackson's text, which we have placed in section 11 of the first part of this volume, could no doubt just as weH have found a horne in section I. This work is aimed at analyzing this interpretation of the operation of identifying fact on the one hand and identifying the meaning of a text on the other. All philosophies of law recognize themselves in the analysis they propose for this interpretation, and we too shall seek in this volume to fumish a few elements of use for this analysis. We wish however to make it clear that our endeavour is addressed not only to legal philosophers: the nature of the interpretive act in legal science is a matter of interest to the legal practitioner too. He will find in these pages, we believe, elements that will serve hirn in rcflcction on his daily work.

3 of law as an object that has always already been there, systematic and com plete. Quite the contrary. Some, indeed practically all of us, reject this sort of epistemology of law, and where the hypothesis of the coherence of the legal universe is put forward, this is in order to define it in very noticeably different terms from those traditionally used in legal scholarly accounts. If this referent, the law presented as a full discourses, runs through all of the contributions, this is because reasoning by analogy has to be found its specific place within this legal culture. It is the place to locate the problem of "lacunae" in law, which at bottom allows our various contributions to be classified. With Zaccaria and Maris, the question of lacunae is accepted as such (this is, we might say, the "traditionalist" aspect of these two articles, which is counterbalanced by - keeping to the same terminology - "modernist" emphases, sometimes Dworkinian in nature), and becomes the backdrop for considerations of purely hermeneutic type, in Zaccaria, ex tended in Maris to the field of ethics. The papers from Lenoble and Jackson, the former philosophical and the latter semiological, take as their main tar get this legal knowledge where the theory of lacunae finds its place."

PATRICKNERHOT Since the two operations overlap each other so much, speaking about fact and interpretation in legal science separately would undoubtedly be highly artificial. To speak about fact in law already brings in the operation we call interpretation. EquaHy, to speak about interpretation is to deal with the method of identifying reality and therefore, in large part, to enter the area of the question of fact. By way of example, Bemard Jackson's text, which we have placed in section 11 of the first part of this volume, could no doubt just as weH have found a horne in section I. This work is aimed at analyzing this interpretation of the operation of identifying fact on the one hand and identifying the meaning of a text on the other. All philosophies of law recognize themselves in the analysis they propose for this interpretation, and we too shall seek in this volume to fumish a few elements of use for this analysis. We wish however to make it clear that our endeavour is addressed not only to legal philosophers: the nature of the interpretive act in legal science is a matter of interest to the legal practitioner too. He will find in these pages, we believe, elements that will serve hirn in rcflcction on his daily work.