Legal Norms as Artistic Painting: Hermeneutics and Impressionism in Law’s Interpretation

This essay stands as food for thought regarding the interdisciplinary debate entailing legal dogmatics, semiotics, and aesthetics to consider legal norms as open impressionistic works, using philosophical hermeneutics, norm theory, and semiotic thinking as theoretical frameworks. The possibility of overcoming the impasse between the stability required by legal dogmatics and the creativity inherent in the act of interpretation is questioned, in order to reconcile text/framework with interpretation using the work of impressionist art as a metaphorical element. The methodology bridges the gap between qualitative bibliographic research in Legal theory, philosophy, semiotics and the arts, being developed in the following stages: examination of the theoretical bases of legal norms and hermeneutics applied to normative language; assessment of the contributions of semiotics and aesthetics to understanding norms; development of the impressionistic model of law as a hermeneutic proposal. The study draws a parallel, a methodological metaphor between the elements of Impressionist aesthetics and the aesthetics of norms and legal interpretation, proposing to overcome the dichotomy between positivism with its formal-literal notion and post-positivism with its creative interpretation, through an approach that preserves legal certainty while recognizing the dynamic nature of language and normative meaning. The impressionist approach viability may be a foregone conclusion to bring together normative stability and contextual adaptation, suggesting comparative studies and empirical research on the application of the model as further developments.