Transformative-Systemic Hermeneutics: Legal Meaning, Institutional Lock-in, and System Shift
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59261/jlsp.v4i5.221Keywords:
System Shift, Legal Hermeneutics, Systemic Interpretation, Transformative Hermeneutics, Legal Theory, Institutional Lock-In, Administrative Burden, Derrida, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Luhmann, Responsive Regulation, ComplexityAbstract
Background: Transformative-systemic hermeneutics addresses a gap in legal interpretation: established hermeneutic traditions explain textual meaning, historical situatedness, suspicion, and undecidability, but they do not fully explain how interpreted meaning becomes institutional routines or how those routines can be shifted when they reproduce exclusion, delay, or unequal access.
Objective: This article aims to construct and theoretically elaborate a transformative-systemic hermeneutic framework that explains how legal meaning becomes institutional behavior and under what conditions interpretation can support verifiable system movement.
Methods: Using conceptual reconstruction and comparative theoretical synthesis, the study selects major hermeneutic, systems-theory, responsive-regulation, institutional, and recent socio-legal sources for their distinct explanatory roles. It compares the problems that each tradition can illuminate, identifies their limits in explaining institutional operation, and synthesizes complementary concepts into a seven-dimensional architecture.
Results: The resulting framework comprises system condition, domain lock, actors, chokepoints, position, strategy, and feedback. It advances three propositions: legal meaning is operational as well as semantic; institutional lock-in is reproduced through routines, incentives, and chokepoints rather than through text alone; and reform-oriented interpretation becomes transformative only when proposed movement can be tied to observable feedback.
Conclusion: Transformative-systemic hermeneutics extends legal interpretation from the recovery of meaning to the diagnosis of institutional movement. The framework is conceptual rather than empirically validated, and future studies should apply and test its dimensions across doctrinal, administrative, and socio-legal settings.
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