No toilets in park.

• Author: Macdonald, Roderick A.
• Position: Transsystemic educational program - Canada

The undergraduate law curriculum adopted at McGill University in 1998--the transsystemic programme--was born of the unique political, social, and intellectual histories of its Faculty of Law. This essay reviews these contexts and characterizes the programme as an ongoing conversation about law, language, and knowledge that has animated the teaching programme since the faculty's founding, 150 years ago.

The essay begins by juxtaposing the phrases "No Vehicles in Park" and "No Toilets in Park" to suggest that law and legal education are hermeneutic endeavours embedded in social experience. At McGill, this interpretive practice may be described as "constitutive polyjurality"--a term the authors coin to capture the theoretical ground of transsystemic teaching, an epistemological and pedagogical practice at once pluralist, polycentric, non-positivist, and interactive.

Using the first-year introductory course Foundations of Canadian Law as an illustration, the authors suggest new directions for the programme. They argue that one of the key goals of the transsystemic programme is to increase opportunities for students to become the agents of their own education and, concomitantly, to participate in the reconstruction of law and legal knowledge.

The transsystemic programme challenges orthodox practices and established categories of knowledge. Curricular configurations, however, cannot be frozen: even constitutive polyjurality may one day lose its privileged place as an interpretive theme at McGill.

Le cursus de premier cycle en droit adopte par l'Universite McGill en 1998--le programme transsystemique--est issu du passe politique, social et intellectuel propre a sa Faculte de droit. Ce texte dresse le bilan de ces contextes et caracterise le programme comme un entretien portant sur le droit, le langage et la connaissance qur n'a cesse d'alimenter le programme d'enseignement depuis la fondation de la faculte, il y a 150 ans.

Le texte debute en juxtaposant les expressions > et >, suggerant que le droit et l'education juridique sont des tentatives hermeneutiques fermement ancrees dans l'experience sociale. a McGill, une telle methode d'interpretation peut etre decrite comme une >--un terme propose par les auteurs afin de rendre ce qui constitue les fondements theorique de l'enseignement Wanssystemique, une pratique epistemologique et pedagogique a la fois pluraliste, polycentrique, non positiviste et interactive.

Prenant l'exemple du cours de premiere annee de Fondements du droit canadien, les auteurs suggerent de nouvelles avenues pour le programme. Ils soutiennent que l'un des objectifs cles du programme transsystemique est d'accroilre les opportunites qu'ont les etudiants de devenir les agents de leur propre education et concurremment de participer dans la reconstruction du droit et de la connaissance juridique.

Le programme transsystemique defie les pratiques orthodoxes et les categories preetablies de connaissance. Les configurations du cursus, toutefois, ne sauraient etre figees: meme la polyjuralite constitutive pourra, un jour, perdre sa place privilegiee a McGill en tant que methode d'interpretation.

Epilogue: No Vehicles in Park I. No: A History without a Past A. A Conversation about a Legal Tradition B. The Conversation Continues II. Vehicles: Means and Ends A. Modes and Sites of Formal Pedagogy in a Foundations Class B. The Informal Tuition of a Foundations Class III. In: Outside In / Inside Out A. The Forms and Processes of Human Interaction B. Identity, Power, Hierarchy IV. Park: Legal Subjects and Legal Agents A. Modes of Communication--Assignment Formats B. The McGill Programme as Reification? Prologue: No Toilets in Park Epilogue: (1) No Vehicles in Park (2)

This meditation upon McGill's "transsystemic" programme of legal education has revisited one of the legal academy's favourite heuristics. How are we to understand a sign stating "No Vehicles in Park"? (3) The usual tack is to deploy this example to bring into relief contrasting approaches to statutory interpretation; to show, moreover, that statutory interpretation, and by implication all legal interpretation, is fundamentally a matter of textual analysis. In the standard model of law, the question reduces to how we should make sense of the words "vehicle" and "park": By their letter, as comprising a core of settled, uncontroversial meaning and a penumbra of uncertainty? Or by their spirit, as necessarily finding their meaning in terms of the surrounding context and underlying purpose? But the example is richer than this.

Here is why. Whatever we may decide about (1) the meaning of "vehicle" (say, as a conveyance like an automobile, or as the occasion for an aspiring actress to display her talents, or as the syrup or tablet through which a medically active agent is administered), (2) particular examples of vehicles understood as conveyances (such as baby carriages, skateboards, bicycles, wheel chairs), (3) the definition of "park" (as a physical space, as a gear in an automatic transmission, as a multivalent transitive verb), (4) the different instances of a park understood as a physical space (such as playgrounds, gardens, nature preserves), (5) the purpose of a park (for example, as a place of repose, or a site of vehicular worship like a car park), and (6) the underlying rationale of the sign, (as not including such occurrences as ambulances speeding heart-attack victims toward emergency care or traffic swerving into the park to avoid striking a young child on the street), we are making critical assumptions about the character of language, the practice of interpretation, and the acquisition of legal knowledge.

Were the sign presented as a pictogram (imagine a red circle at the centre of which is an automobile or bicycle overlain by a red diagonal line, or alternatively, a red circle at the centre of which is a depiction of a car's transmission gears with the indicator at Park overlain by a red diagonal line), a different set of interpretative conventions and practices would have to be engaged. In these cases we know that the location of the pictogram (for example, on the boundaries of an open space, or at the entrance to a carwash) provides at least some of the context necessary for interpretation to proceed. Yet even this reflection is incomplete, for in both pictograms there is an imported assumption of normativity. We assume that the pictogram is meant to command or prohibit action. Where do these normative assumptions come from?

Contrast the first of the signs considered above (comprising the text "No Vehicles in Park") to the at once grammatically and syntactically equivalent sign "No Toilets in Park". It appears that the red circle and diagonal line in the pictogram convey what grammar, syntax, and other semantic conventions in the cases of the written signs cannot. And yet, here also we assume too much. When we confront, say in the washroom of a public campground, a similar red circle with a diagonal slash superimposed upon a water faucet issuing drips into a cup, we read "The Water is Not Potable" (or perhaps an implicit normative caution such as "You Are Advised Not to Drink the Water"), but not a prohibition. No theory of legal interpretation that rests only upon words, grammar, and syntax, and no general theories of authorial intent, the temper of the times, or the technical capacities of natural languages, can alone answer why in Montreal in 2005 "No Toilets in Park" will typically be understood as descriptive and "No Vehicles in Park" will usually be read as prohibitive. (4)

This said, all is not lost. Communication happens, and most often we do make perfect sense of signs like these. The puzzle invites us to consider how it is possible to maintain skepticism about rules as normative in and of themselves but still remain committed to seeking an explanation of the relationship between artifacts and our conduct. Neither the signified referents nor the normative consequences of the signs are to be found within their formulation and presentation. (5) In just looking at the sign, why do we sometimes find law? Recall Wittgenstein's observation that misunderstanding in interpretation can be a source of new understanding. (6) Moving beyond the initial terms of the Hart-Fuller debate, we can see that interpretation is neither just there (in Hart's positivist perspective, external to the sign or pre-set) nor simply here (in Fuller's contextual view, internal to the sign or immanent). (7) Rather, as Fuller later came to argue, the sense of signs like "No Vehicles in Park" is bound up with and constitutive of the matrix of social relations through which they are generated and read. (8)

Discovering and engaging with legal rules and, more generally, with law as a whole, is interpretive practice. The interpreter of the sign "No Vehicles in Park" is not merely an exegete of some prior jurisgenerative activity. Rather, the interpreter is an agent engaged in constituting both the meaning of the sign and his or her own relationship to it. Interpretation is, in this sense, an embedded and embodied practice by which interpreters also discover and project their identity. (9)

This paper takes the position that the study of law is also an interpretive practice. (10) It traces out the implications of such a position for the meaning and shape of legal education today and, in particular, asks what does taking this kind of hermeneutic stance tell about the assumptions and aspirations of the new McGill Programme. We have chosen as the specific focus of inquiry a first-year course that has existed in one form or another since the establishment of the faculty, and that since the creation of the National Programme in 1968, has borne the title "Foundations of Canadian Law". One of us has taught the course in three decades with three different self-described orientations: Foundations of Canadian Law (1982-1988); Foundations of Law (1990-1995); and...