 For this very reason, of course, every legal system has tribunals for the resolution of legal disputes. They are always an integral part of the system of governance in a state that is ruled by law, although they very often have various forms of independence from other institutions of the system. The tribunals or courts typically have authority to interpret the lawmaking use of language and to determine its effect in particular cases. Unlike the parties to a dispute, courts are characteristically involved with the lawmakers in the enterprise of governance (even where the courts are independent), and often have their own lawmaking capacities. Their role in the system is the substratum for a cooperative principle that has even deeper significance (and somewhat simpler implications) in the operation of a legal system, than Grice’s cooperative principle has in ordinary conversation. And, of course, that cooperative role of a court in the legal system constrains the arguments of parties to a dispute: however strongly they are inclined to twist the language of the law (and however strongly they may feel that the other side is twisting the language of the law), they need an argument that will persuade an institution that is committed, at least in principle, to cooperative interpretation of lawmaking acts. One way of explaining the decision in is to say that the Lord Chief Justice cooperated with the legislature by treating the legislature as having adhered to Grice’s Cooperative Principle: ‘Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged’ (Grice 1989, 26; for discussion of the principle see  Grice).  Sometimes, as lawyers know well, courts interpret legislation in more or less non-cooperative ways, and it is not hard to envisage legislative pathologies (or to identify real life examples of pathologies) that justify such an attitude on the part of judges. If courts take a generally non-cooperative attitude to legislation, the whole legal system suffers from a pathology: an inability to sustain the rule-of-law values of openness and clarity of the laws.